This post is the second in our series featuring Zimbabwean Conservation projects and organisations. This time round, we visit a recently completed project in the beautiful Matobo hills.

The Matopos or Matobo Hills, owes its name (meaning “bald heads”) to the granite kopjes that characterise this unique landscape. The hills cover about 3100 km² and is deemed extremely important culturally (it was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2003) as well as ecologically (it hosts over 200 species of trees and the world’s largest concentration of black eagles, to name a few).

But it’s not only a site of rock art, trees and birds – the kopjes and wooded valleys offer prime leopard habitat. Although these carnivores have long been known to occur here, until recently nobody really had any handle on the size of the population, their habitat preferences or movement patterns.

Tanith Grant’s project attempted (and succeeded) in addressing these gaps. Over three years, with the help of trained members of the local community, she collected information using telemetry, camera traps and other census techniques that ultimately enabled her to come up with the first population estimate of the predators in the Mangwe area.

This information, together with her spatial movement data, now allow the Zimbabwean Parks and Wildlife authority (ZPWA) to devise and implement better management strategies for the sustainable conservation of a top predator that is both ecologically and economically valuable and affecting.

Photos: Tanith Grant

You can find Tanith’s project on MAPA’s conservation layer for Google Earth. Click here to download the KML file and then double click on the downloaded file to open it in your “Places” panel in Google Earth. Search for “Mangwe Leopard Project” (like in the screenshot below) to find this project (remember that you can add your own project to this map!).

Also be sure to check out Rhodes University’s Wildlife and Reserve Management Research Groups’ website to learn more about some of the other research this group is involved in.

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We’re now into the third week of our drive to create a registry of Zimbabwean conservation projects.  As we pick up speed in the buildup to our visit to Harare, we’d like to share with you, in the next fortnight, some of the great work being done by conservation organisations and institutions in Zimbabwe.

The first of these featured organisations is the Centre de coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (Cirad). Cirad is a French research agency that has been conducting applied agricultural research for over twenty years in  Zimbabwe.  Since 2007, Cirad with three other institutions, namely University of Zimbabwe, the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), and CNRS (another French-based research agency), have embarked on a research platform called “Production and Conservation in Partnership” (RP-PCP).

The objective of the platform is to address human-nature conflicts in the periphery of protected areas, including TFCAs.  Research themes addressed are community based natural resource management, agriculture and conservation, functional ecology and animal health and environment.  The RP-PCP with the support of the French Embassy in Zimbabwe and funds from research and development projects, promote post-graduate training (Msc, MPhil and PhD), mostly for Zimbabwean students and when possible for staff from technical services.  So far, the RP-PCP has supported 11 PhDs, 22 MPhil and 8 MSc (with 35% completed).

Land-use differences at the periphery of Protected Areas (photo: A. Caron)

Two examples of Cirad projects within the RP-PCP are their disease transmission projects at the wildlife/livestock interface in Gonarezhou National Park (Greater Limpopo TFCA) and Hwange National Park (Kavango-Zambezi TFCA) – both these projects can be seen on the MAPA conservation layer.

One thing these two parks have in common is that they are both located along international borders and within TFCAs wildlife/livestock interfaces are numerous in these TFCAs (sometimes with fences but often with no physical barrier between land-uses). One of the consequences of these interfaces is the transmission of important diseases (e.g. Foot-and-Mouth Disease, bovine tuberculosis, theileriosis) from wildlife to cattle and vice versa, threatening both conservation and development objectives.

Understanding and managing wildlife/livestock interaction and disease transmission on the periphery of these protected areas and TFCAs is thus particularly critical, and exactly what Cirad and its partners hopes to achieve by fitting GPS collars to both cattle and buffalos and surveying these ungulate populations for major diseases. This issue is important for wildlife conservation, livestock production (and therefore for rural livelihoods) but also for public health as some of these diseases such as zoonoses can be transmitted from animals to humans (e.g. brucellosis, rift valley fever).

Cattle in a dip-tank (left) and interviews with cattle farmers (right) (photos: A. Caron)

The sanitary aspect is only one of the aspects addressed through the RP-PCP. Human-Elephant conflicts, impact of tourism and hunting on the wildlife resource, perceptions of farmers on TFCAs and many other topics are tackled by research students (click here to see and download a leaflet).

Both disease transmission projects, as well as the Research platform have now been added to MAPA’s database and can be found on our Google Earth layer. To explore the great work Cirad does in Zimbabwe in Google Earth, download MAPA’s conservation layer for Google Earth, or visit their website.

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Our Zimbabwe drive is now in full swing, and, with the help of Zimbabwe’s conservation practitioners, we’re steadily busy populating the MAPA database with Zimbabwean conservation projects.

Whereas our current focus is all about creating a map of conservation projects, the MAPA Google Earth layer and searchable map comprise a few additional “categories” of conservation effort, including critical habitats and, of course, protected areas.

In the last couple of months, in an attempt to get all parts of our conservation map as complete as possible, we’ve been updating the representation of Zimbabwe’s protected areas. We’ve even added a few slideshows as a special treat, like the beautiful Gonarezhou slideshow we shared with you in last week’s post, and the  slideshow of Matusadona National Park below. To see these slideshows in Google Earth, download and open the MAPA layer, click on the “Click here to see more” button in any of the protected areas bubbles, and look out for the orange camera icon, labeled “slideshow”. If you see that, you’re in luck.

Matusadona National Park (Photos: Peter Levey)

As always, though, the MAPA layer is in the hands of Africa’s conservationists. We’re not the experts on Zimbabwean protected areas….you are! If you have a particular interest in or knowledge of any of these areas, particularly if you run a project close to or in any of these parks, reserves and conservancies, we’d love to hear from you!

We’ve put together a cut-out map of only the Zimbabwean protected areas (click here to download this, and then double click on the downloaded file to open it in Google Earth). Please have a look at the bubbles and boundaries and let us know how we can represent “your” protected area more accurately and aesthetically.  To comment you can either click on the “add comment” or “send correction” links at the bottom of every bubble, or simply send us an email.

We’re thoroughly enjoying finding and putting together the puzzle pieces of Zimbabwe’s conservation story, and we hope that you can help us tell this part of that narrative as accurately as possible. Look out for the first project features next week and if you haven’t added your project yet, we hope you will soon!

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In the last two months, we’ve been telling you lots about our collaborative drive to create a map and registry of Zimbabwean conservation projects.  Today we’re very happy to announce that yesterday, a little belatedly, this drive officially kicked off.  It will be running until the 5^th of May.

Gonarezhou National Park (Photos: Peter Levey)

In the next six weeks, if you’re a conservationist working in Zimbabwe, we would like to ask you to go to our brand new, easy-to-use, online project portal, register as a user, and add your conservation project(s) to MAPA’s database.  Your project will automatically appear on our publically available Google Earth layer, and searchable online map.

As a little extra encouragement, we’re running a number of other promotions and initiatives as part of this drive. You can find out more about these over at our Zimbabwean focus site, but, just to whet your appetite, here are a few highlights:

• A free Africa Geographic/Africa Birds & Birding subscription and Tracks4Africa GPS map – just for adding your project!

Every project leader who adds a conservation project (active/completed in Zimbabwe) will receive a free 6-month Africa Geographic/Birds and Birding digital subscription and a Tracks4Africa GPS map for Zambia and Zimbabwe.  Tracks4Africa will also be giving away a free GPS to one randomly selected project.

A big thank you to Africa Geographic and Tracks4Africa for this great sponsorship!

• Google Geo Tool workshop in Harare!

We will be running a 3-day Google Geo Tool workshop in Harare, from the 3^rd-5^th of May. At the workshop we will show you how to get the most out of Google Earth, Google Maps, Fusion Tables and other tools for your conservation project.

Learn more and sign up here, if you haven’t already.

• Google Geo Tool Initiative: maps for your project!

Would you like to see your animal collar tracks animated in Google Earth, create a map of your projects’ activities for your sponsors, share your GIS data with collaborators or create a mini-documentary in Google Earth? Let us know what you would like to do, and we’ll help you do it.

For more information, and to get a few ideas for your own project, head over to our Google Geo tool page.

We can scarcely wait to learn about the real work that goes into Zimbabwean conservation, the issues these conservationists face and the threats they are seeking to address.  In the next six weeks, we’ll be sharing these stories with you as they come in – we’ll be posting to this blog, as well as to our Twitter, Google+ and Facebook profiles.

If you’d like to learn more about our Zimbabwean conservation focus, head over to the drive’s website.  And if you do any conservation work in Zimbabwe, we hope that you’ll add your project today!

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If you’ve been following us in the last year or so, you’ll know by now that MAPA is collaborating with conservationists to build a registry and map of African conservation projects:  we provide the map and we let your pin your project on it.

How does this work practically? You have to go to a website, register as a user, fill out a form with information about your project, and make your record public. The map updates dynamically from the database and your project will show up on our Google Earth layer, and on our searchable browser-based map. [For a more detailed explanation of this process, read this blog post]

Easy enough? Well, it should have been. But up until know many conservationists have found the online form a little confusing to use and have consequently struggled to add their projects.

We listened to them, and today, just in time for the launch of our Zimbabwean drive, we’re happy to announce that we now have a brand new, user-friendly place when you can add your project: head over to mapa.mapaproject.org and tell us what you think!

One new feature you’ll see in the new interface  is  green help/instruction boxes that appear as you start entering your information in any given cell – so you should be able to add your project without having to consult instructions. However, if you’d like a little more orientation first, we have put together a new help page (currently residing on the Zimbabwean site, but not only for Zimbabweans!) and have launched a new help forum to guide you along.

If you’ve already added your project using the old system, don’t worry! Just log in as per usual to the new system and you will see your project records and associated information.

We hope that you enjoy this new interface, and if you haven’t already, you’ll add your conservation project soon!

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One of the main goals of the MAPA Project is to make conservation more visible. For this reason we marry our project very tightly to both using and teaching tools that can help conservationists visualise and communicate their work, be it to policy makers, the general public, or peers. It is in this spirit that we occasionally put on Google Geo Tool workshops – events where we teach conservationists how to use Google Earth, Google Maps and Fusion Tables to visualise, map and communicate their work.

Google Geo Tool workshop in Harare, 3-5 May 2012

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be running one of these workshops in Harare, from the 3rd to the 5th of May 2012.  You don’t need to be a GIS boffin or tech wiz to attend, only comfortable with using your computer – our workshops are designed for conservation practitioners of all levels of qualifications and assume no programming or GIS skills.

At the training we will introduce you to using Google Earth, Google Maps and Fusion Tables for supporting decision making, increasing public awareness, and creating maps for your conservation project or organisation. We hope to also use this event to tell you more about how you can use the MAPA Project’s conservation map, to showcase Zimbabwean conservation projects (your work!) and most importantly, to meet you!

You can apply to attend here.

Google Geo Tool Initiative: Let us help you visualise your work!

As part of our special focus on Zimbabwe, we will go a step further than just teaching you how to use Google Earth, Maps and Fusion Tables – we’ll actually use these tools to create or help create material specifically for your project. For the next six week, if you’re a Zimbabwean conservationist or working in Zimbabwe, you can tell us what map or visualisation you need and we will either help you to create it or point you in the right direction.

We’ve put together a few examples on our Zimbabwe conservation site specifically to help guide you through the types of projects we can put together for you.  Rembember that we will teach you how to create projects at the workshop, and that there are a wealth of online tutorials available to walk you step by step through creating your own project.  For each of the example project on our site, we’ve pointed you to one or more of these tutorials in case you’d like to have a stab at creating a similar project with your own data.

We’ll bring you more news on the Zimbabwe conservation registry drive, including how and where to add your projects, very soon. Until then, we look forward to receiving your applications for the workshop and hearing about your conservation projects!

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If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll know that for the last little while, we here at MAPA have had Gonarezhou on our minds. And Mana pools, Kariba dam, Victoria Falls, Matobo Hills….in fact, we’ve been getting downright zesty about Zim. We’re pleased to let you know that this affliction is only going to get worse! Don’t worry; we are still thinking about other conservation projects and places too! Here is our latest newsletter:

The Great Zimbabwe registry

Last week we officially announced the Zimbabwe drive, due to start on the 19^th of March.  What is this drive exactly? Simply put, MAPA will be collaborating with Zimbabwean conservationists to build a registry and map of Zimbabwean conservation projects. We’ll also be highlighting issues of concern, organisations who work in Zimbabwe and hope to bring you many great Zimbabwean maps. Visit the drive’s website to find out more, or subscribe to the mailing list if you’d like to get weekly updates via email.

Google Geo: Zimbo style

Last year we put on a number of very popular Google Geo Tool workshops with conservationists from all over Africa. We love doing these workshops, both because we get to equip conservationists with practical skills to communicate their work, and because they allow us to get to know the people behind the work – which can lead down all sorts of exciting roads.

At our last workshop, for example, we were pleasantly surprised to meet the ladies from the Dambari Wildlife Trust, who travelled all the way down from Bulawayo to attend the training in Johannesburg. We started talking; one thing lead to another, and three months later, the Zimbabwe drive was born!

Verity Bowman (far left) and Nicola Pegg (left) from the Dambari Wildlife Trust hard at work at the EWT workshop

It comes as no great surprise then, that our focus on Zimbabwe will include not only a Google Geo workshop or two, but a six-week long initiative where we will help you create your own Google Earth, Google Maps and Fusion Tables mapping projects.

We’re kicking off the Google Geo part of the drive by starting small:  On the 19^th and 20^th of March we’ll be running a very personalised workshop in Cape Town, at the University of the Western Cape’s swanky new facilities. The workshop is for anyone in conservation or natural science who works in Zimbabwe, or with Zimbabwean data.

Although we will still teach you to use Google Earth, Maps, Fusion Tables and how to get the most out of MAPA’s conservation map (just like at our regular workshops), this workshop will be highly focused on participants’ own data. In fact, we’d like to be so focused on your work that we’re restricting the workshop to just 10 participants. There are a few spots left, so if you’re interested in attending, let us know soonest by emailing mapaworkshops[at]gmail[dot]com. We’ll follow up on a case-by-case basis.

For those of you who are worried about making it down to Cape Town from Zim – don’t worry, there is (at least) one workshop in Zimbabwe on the cards at the end of the drive, in early May. We’ll tell you more about that, as well as how you can get the most out of the Google Geo Tool initiative, in the next fortnight.

Africa Geographic and Tracs4Africa partner up with us for the Zimbabwe drive

The MAPA Project tells the world about African conservation projects and where they happen and so it seems only right that we should be teaming up with the continent’s premier conservation story-teller and master navigator.

As part of the Zimbabwe drive, Africa Geographic has kindly agreed to hand out a free 6-month digital subscription to their magazine (either Africa Geographic magazine or Africa Birds & Birding) to every organisation that adds a project. On top of that, Tracks4Africa will make sure you get a copy of their GPS maps for Zimbabwe and Zambia, and will also give away a handheld GPS to one randomly-selected participant.

You can learn more about these, and other great incentives over at the Zimbabwe drive website.  A big thank you to Africa Geographic and Tracks4Africa for your generosity!

Registering Rhino Projects

This year, MAPA will be going about populating our conservation map in a number of ways. We’ll be focusing more on countries (Zimbabwe being the current focus, obviously), but also on topics and taxa that span the continent.

As far as conservation topics go, they don’t come much hotter than the current Rhino poaching crisis, and we will be doing our bit by turning our attention to creating a near-complete registry of African Rhino projects, in the very near future.

As an appetiser, we recently put out a “first call” to Rhino conservationists and researchers. There’s much more in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Remember that you can add your project at any time, whatever your conservation topic or country of residence! If you’re confused about how to get started, here’s a little help.

We’re not only mapping projects!

You may have noticed that we never refer to ourselves by our “full” original name anymore. Whereas we were once mapping Africa’s Protected Areas, we’ve now slightly outgrown our name. However, we do still represent protected areas and other critical habitats on our maps, and we still need your help to get it right!  To learn more about how we threw our name away and how we went about putting protected areas on the map, read our two part blog series here:[part 1][part 2].

Action-packed Autumn

We’ve got some exciting developments lined up for the next three months: We’ll be bringing you revamped project-input screens, new training materials, more Google Geo Tool workshop news, plenty of Zimbabwean conservation maps and hopefully, a more complete African conservation map!  For updates and news, follow us on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

We’ll see you at the end of May.  Until then, a big, big thank you to all our friends, supporters and collaborators. This project wouldn’t exist without you!

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What if there was an easy way you could easily find out what work other conservationists in your field were involved in? What they were doing to address the same problems you have? Who were funding them? Who they were collaborating with? What if your project could be visible to others in your field? A public that could contribute? Grant-making bodies that could fund your work?

For the past two years, we here at MAPA have been building just such a tool with our online project registry and map. It’s been showing great potential and we’ve had wonderful encouragement from conservationists from all over Africa, but we also know that it will ultimately only really be useful if enough African conservationists are represented on it. But Africa is a big place! And so we’re tackling this enormous task one country at a time!

A few weeks ago, we told you about our Zimbabwe Conservation Registry drive, an initiative that will see the MAPA Project working with conservationists in Zimbabwe to achieve just such a registry and map for this country of Miombo woodlands, mighty waterways and majestic wildlife.

Thanks to encouragement from the many Zimbabwean conservationists we’ve been in contact with since then, and a generous partnership with Africa Geographic and Tracks4Africa, we can now officially announce that this drive will take place between the 19^th of March and the 30^th of April 2012. We can scarcely wait!

So what will the Zimbabwe registry drive entail?

The main thing we’ll ask participating individuals and organisations to do is to add an online “project profile” for each of their projects.  If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that anyone can do this do this already. However we’ve been working on more user-friendly input screens to make adding projects even easier and will be making these available just before the start of the drive, together with updated help materials and increased support.

During the drive, we’ll also be supporting conservationists with more ways to make Zimbabwean conservation more visible. Generally, we’ll be updating protected areas and critical habitats on our conservation map. Specifically, we’ll be offering workshops to teach conservationists how to use the MAPA tool for their own organisations, as well as how to use tools like Google Earth, Google Maps and Fusion Tables to highlight and communicate their own data, and the issues they care about. We’ll be going one step further and even help them create these visualisations.

But we don’t want to give too much away! More news on these initiatives soon!

Gifts from Africa Geographic and Tracks4Africa

To make it a little more appealing to go to the trouble of adding a project, our partners at Tracks4Africa and Africa Geographic are offering a few nice incentives to every organisation which loads a project:

• Every organisation which loads one or more projects will be able to download the latest Garmin compatible GPS map for Zimbabwe & Zambia for free, from Tracks4Africa. It’s a routable map, with 38,000km of roads and over 5,000 points of interest.

• Everyone will also be able to claim a free 6-month digital subscription to Africa Geographic or Africa – Birds & Birding

• MAPA, T4A and Africa Geographic will also be doing their best to publicise this effort and give your projects some exposure.

Interested? Follow along!

We’ll be talking a lot more  about the Zimbabwe drive in the coming weeks. If you’re interested in following along, or participating, here are some ways that you can keep abreast of developments:

• We will be updating the Zimbabwe registry website with the latest news and developments.

• We’ll be sending out a more-or-less weekly email with updates, news and information to our Zimbabwean mailing list. Sign up here, if you’d like to join it! You’ll receive more or less one email a week until the end of April.

• We’ll be using our social media platforms to make new announcements too and undertake to use these platforms to highlight your efforts by re-tweeting, re-posting and re-sharing – so follow us on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

A big thank you to all the Zimbabwean conservationists who have already weighted in to make this initiative possible.  A special thank you to our friends at the Dambari Wildlife trust, and our partners at Africa Geographic and Tracks4Africa. We certainly couldn’t do any of this without you!

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The MAPA Project exists in large part to help conservationists make the work they do, the wildlife they protect, and the problems that they care about, more visible.

As far as problems are concerned, few would argue that rhino poaching occupies a very central place on the conservation agenda at the moment.

With seemingly insatiable demand for rhino horn in Asia, rhino deaths at the hands of poachers rose sharply in 2011, and soared in 2012. But see for yourself: we created an interactive Fusion Table map of SANParks’ tally, which they released earlier this week. Click on the polygons to explore the situation in each of South Africa’s nine provinces, and in the Kruger National Park.

Rhino poaching is a difficult problem, but there can be no denying that a lot of organisations are doing wonderful work, tackling it from many different angles.  Some run awareness campaigns in Asia, others lobby governments, and others yet help kit out and support anti-poaching rangers.

While it’s great that so many organisations are throwing their weight behind the issue, the general public is often lost when it comes to knowing exactly where to direct their money, and attention. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way that they could find out exactly who was doing what, and where they were doing it?

We think that we can create exactly such a resource…with your help.

How? The MAPA Project upload website allows anyone in conservation to register and add information about their project online (see this video for help).

All you have to do is to add your project here, and whatever you add will appear both on our Google Earth conservation layer and searchable Google map. Not only will anyone looking for information on rhinos be able to find you on the map, but you can also create a custom map of the information that you care about by downloading your search results to Google Earth.

But our map is not the only way we help conservationists make their work visible.

Did you know that (without having to be a programmer) you can create a similar map  from your own data, using a free tool called Fusion Tables? (Here’s a tutorial if you would like to try).

Over the last couple of years, we’ve increasingly used free Geo tools like Google Earth, Google Maps and Fusion Tables to create and help create data stories for our own project, and for other conservationists that we work with….and we’d like you to get the most out of these tools too!

If you have a story, animation or  mapping project that you would like to include in the MAPA Google Earth layer, a report  or your website,  it can probably be done quite quickly using these online tools.   If you prefer to explore and learn on your own, head over to the Google Earth Outreach site to get started. Otherwise, tell us what you want to do and we’ll help, or at least point you in the right direction.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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