In our last newsletter, we announced that MAPA, with the help of the Dambari Wildlife trust and a few of our other friends, is embarking on an effort to focus some of our mapping on Zimbabwe specifically. Our hope is that, by the middle of 2012, we’ll have a near-comprehensive inventory of Zimbabwe’s conservation efforts up on the map.

We are now getting ready to launch into action on this drive, and you can expect a very exciting announcement from us on this topic within the next month.

In the meantime, we’re going to need your help to make sure that we don’t leave out anyone that should be on the map.  Thanks to the help of our friends at Dambari we’ve already got an impressive list  going, but we want to make sure we’re not missing anyone. Do you know anyone active in a conservation project in Zimbabwe?  Who should we be adding to the list? Are you doing some work in Zimbabwe?  If you think we should know about anyone or any particular project, fill in this short form (this is for internal use only – we promise we won’t distribute anything) or simply tell us by email.

Please help us get Zimbabwean conservation on the map! If you would like to be notified via email about updates for the “Mapping Zimbabwe” drive, you can sign up for that here.

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In our last newsletter, we told you that you could find all 321 Working for Water projects, as well as 150,000 of their specifically monitored clearing areas (NBALs) on our conservation map (NBAL sites are currently only available in the Google Earth version).  As we explained, each specific area bubble comprises information on how that area has been managed: the money spent on it, the person days of employment created by clearing it, the dominant alien species targeted and the total number of hectares cleared within it.

How are these areas cleared? Working for Water uses all sorts of methods to keep the aliens in check, including chemical controls (like herbicides), manual methods (like frilling and fires) and biological control, the targeting of aliens by their own natural enemies.

A big reason for the propensity of alien species to become dominant in their new habitats is the fact that they often outcompete indigenous vegetation for nutrients and water, a function of their general resistance to the effects of the local army of plant enemies (mostly insects, mites, and pathogens). Biocontrol is an attempt to remove this competitive advantage by allowing these invaders’ natural enemies to level the playing fields and let the natural vegetation catch up. Though biocontrol agents don’t normally kill their targets, biocontrol is a cost-effective,  sustainable and ecologically friendly method of alien control and an important tool in the fight against invasive plants.

In addition to their projects and clearing sites on MAPA’s conservation map, you can now also find all the places where Working for Water has released  biocontrol agents to target alien invasive plants.  Like the NBAL clearing sites, you can access this layer from the “footprint” tab in any of the Working for Water project bubbles.  Click on “view” and you’ll see all the biocontrol sites, denoted by insect icons (as shown above), appear.  To find out which agent was used and when they were released at an individual site, simply click on the icon.

We’re thrilled that our conservation map can be used to make the scope and activities of one of Africa’s largest conservation initiatives more visible and hope that you will enjoy this newest addition to that story.

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With 2011 moving into it’s twilight days, MAPA would like to wish all our supporters, friends, collaborators and readers a very happy festive season and a prosperous new year. We’ll see you in 2012!

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As the southern hemisphere spring makes way for the South Easters, sweltering heat and thunderstorm skies of African summers, we look back on the last three months to find a more complete picture of African conservation slowly emerging on our map as it sprouts more and more points of conservation interest. Here is our latest newsletter.

Important Bird Areas are on the map!

Given limited resources,  conservation triage requires that we favour some areas over others in order to make sure we conserve the most important places on the planet, and as much biodiversity as possible.  However, determining where these critical areas are can be tricky and costly, and so, in the absence of perfect ecological knowledge,  biologists have to look to taxa that can be relied on to reflect  the overall biodiversity and ecological value of a particular area.

As a generally well-studied, often well-travelled, ubiquitous taxa found in nearly every habitat on earth, birds are considered to be particularly good at being such indicators.  Areas that are important to the conservation of birds are thus likely to be important to other biodiversity too, which is one of the reasons we are particularly pleased that all 1218 African Important Bird Areas can now be found on our conservation map.  Read more here.

MAPA in Africa Geographic

Africa Geographic has surely set the gold standard for relating African conservation stories to the public and this would be reason enough for us to be happy about being featured in this magazine.  However, our spread in their November edition is also significant in that it speaks to one way we hope our map will be useful to conservation, namely to connect environmental journalists with conservation and wildlife stories that need the public’s attention.

Africa Geographic has kindly made the article available to us, so you can read more about our (short) history and hopes for the future by viewing the PDF here.

Working for Water projects infest South Africa

In the 17 years that the Working for Water programme has been running, this massive effort has received international praise for its innovative approach to the eradication of invasive alien plants. The programme has provided more than 20,000 people from marginalised communities with jobs, and runs 321 projects countrywide, spanning more than 150,000 land clearing units (NBALs) totaling more than a million hectares.

All 321 of these projects, as well as the 150,000+ NBALs have now been added to MAPA’s conservation map.  Each clearing unit contains information on targeted species, money spent and jobs created for that specific area, information only available in GIS files housed at the Working for Water offices until now. Currently the clearing units are only downloadable by province, via the “footprint” tab on the Google Earth layer, but we look forward to bringing you smaller, more manageable NBALs for individual projects, as well as more Working for Water news, very soon.

Google Geo Tool workshop in Johannesburg

In an attempt to take our map to Africa’s conservation community, teach them how to get the most out of it, and equip them with more tools to visualise their efforts spatially, MAPA has put on a number of Google Geo Tool workshops this year.  Most recently, we found ourselves in Modderfontein, Johannesburg where, together with the Endangered Wildlife Trust, we hosted more than sixty conservationists from as far afield as Kampala and Bulawayo at two back-to-back three day workshops.  Read more about our jolly to Jozi in this blog post.

Sticking with the Endangered Wildlife Trust…

From it’s humble beginnings as a tiny nonprofit  ran from conservation legend Clive Walker’s garage in 1973, the EWT has grown into one of the most well-respected conservation organisations on the continent.  Today, the red and white cheetah pawprint is synonymous with on-the-ground-conservation action addressing some of Africa’s most pressing conservation issues.  There are more than 70 of these projects across Africa, and, as of last month, you can find them all on the searchable conservation map, or on our Google Earth layer.  We hope you enjoy exploring!

Special focus on Zimbabwe

To say that Zimbabwe has had a tough time politically is a little bit like saying that Nandos ads tend to elicit reaction. However, despite the challenges it faces, Zimbabwe’s conservation community is alive and well, and doing great work. In the coming few months, with the help of our friends at the Dambari Wildlife Trust and other Zimbabwean conservation organisations, one of our main focuses will be to get a comprehensive inventory of Zimbabwe’s conservation efforts up on the map. If you can help us with this task, please get in contact!

On that note, we sign off for this quarter. For more news and updates, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or on our brand new Google+ page!

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Every now and again, MAPA puts on workshops where we teach conservation practitioners how to use Google’s  mapping tools to visualise and communicate complex datasets and conservation issues to the public, collaborators, funders and each other.

Why do we do this?  At MAPA our mission is to visualise African conservation and, rather than trying to do that ourselves, we feel that we can achieve this better by supporting African conservation practitioners with tools that they can use to tell their own stories.   They are, after all, the ones best qualified to tell them.

One way we support them in this, is by offering a tool that allows anyone active in conservation anywhere on the continent to add their projects to a public, (now) searchable map of African conservation [Earth, Maps].  We further support conservationists in communicating the issues and stories they care about by offering training to equip them with the skills they need to create their own visualisations. That’s what we do with the Google Geo Tool trainings – these tools are all free and easy to use, and underpin and complement our own tool. Moreover, these events are a great opportunity to recruit more collaborators for our own map.

So it was for one of these workshops that we found ourselves at the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s out-of-the-box new training facilities in Modderfontein, Johannesburg last week.  We were meeting up with more than 60 conservationists representing academia, government, the nonprofit community and even the private sector, from as far afield as Kampala and Bulawayo (during the workshops we collaborated on a Fusion Table of workshops participants – each participant added/edited their information and added their home bases to create the map you see below).

What we really wanted to do in this round of workshops was to marry participants’ needs with what Google Earth, Google Maps, Fusion Tables and the Open Data Kit could offer. So after spending some time on the basics, we focused the remaining “structured’ workshop time on visualising GPS, GIS and tabular data sets using these tools, and sharing these maps with collaborators, or the world via email, social networking channels, websites and presentations.  This got us ready to tackle the third, more relaxed project day, but not before stretching our legs with a much needed ODK mobile data collection session.  This exercise saw us wandering around the Pinelands business park complex to record patches of alien Pine and Jacaranda trees, before meeting back at the training centre to look at these data points in Google Earth and Fusion Tables (below).

In keeping with our goal to make these workshops applicable to participants’ own work, we spent the third workshop day consolidating the preceding two days’ work by diving into some real world data.  On this day, participants got a chance to brainstorm ideas for and work on their own projects.  A first for our workshops, the project work day completely validated the workshops for us. It was wonderful to see how different tools were or could be applied in real life, and from MAPA’s point of view it was wonderful to learn about the great projects conservationists are involved in across Southern Africa.

Despite our bandwidth battles, the Jozi traffic, and the complete irrelevance of Google Earth’s “terrain” feature on the East Rand, we had a great time in Gauteng.  Partnering with the Endangered Wildlife Trust was an incredible privilege for us, and a complete pleasure to boot. Their dedication and commitment behind the scenes ensured that the event ran smoothly, and we can’t say thank you enough for that.

Similarly, we are exceedingly grateful to our participants for helping to make this such a great event. We started these workshops hoping to equip conservationists with skills, but landed up learning so much ourselves. We left the City of Gold humbled, but feeling more equipped, both in spirit and understanding, to show the world what African conservationists are doing and where they are doing it.

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After our Google Geo tool workshop in Arusha earlier this year, there was one question nearly all participants asked us in their feedback: could we come and train others at their institutions?  That was, in fact, the question that prompted us to write this blog series – we love trainings and meeting new people doing great work in conservation, but of course it’s not possible to go to every conservation organisation to run them.

The good news is that there is a wealth of training resources that can help you put together a training for your colleagues and collaborators. So, whether  you are trying to improve skills in your organisation, have a mapping or visualisation project that you need to collaborate on or are that person your department  tired of doing things that you know your colleagues should be doing themselves, this post is for you!

Getting up to speed yourself

It goes without saying that you need to be familiar with the materials you intend to train others on.  If you’re reading this post, you may already be familiar with one or more of the Google mapping tools, but may be unsure whether you’ve covered all the bases necessary for your training. Luckily, whether you are a seasoned GIS pro /tech wiz or someone whose technical capabilities extent to operating a kettle, this knowledge is both easy to find and practice.

In-person trainings

Arguably the best way to get up to speed with Google Geo tools is to be trained by others – this is, after all, why you’re thinking of training others in your organisation and not pointing them to online tutorials.

Attending training before attempting to train others will give you a feel for the kind of workshop you’ll be looking to run, the pace of exercises you’re likely to do, and the kind of questions people are likely to ask.  You’ll also be able to access to trainers whose experiences may help guide you in planning your training.

If you’re really fortunate, you may find yourself able to attend a workshop (like this one held in Vancouver, Canada recently) organised and ran by Google Earth Outreach. These trainings  are highly-practical and cover the widest range of topics you’re likely to come across – and you’ll have true experts on hand to answer your questions. To make sure that you don’t miss announcements on upcoming trainings, subscribe to the Google Earth Outreach announcement group, or follow them on Twitter.

Other organisations that are not affiliated with Google (like us) also run Google Geo trainings, more geared towards specific groups, goals or projects.  These trainings may cover a selection of topics, including Google Earth, Google Maps, Fusion Tables, Open Data Kit, Google Map Maker,  SketchUp and Google Geo APIs, and may even include trainings on other Google Apps – there should be something out there for you.

MAPA’s workshops in South Africa cover Google Earth, Google Maps, Fusion Tables and ODK, occasionally Google Map Maker, as well as the use of our conservation map. We’ve hosted trainings in the Western Cape, and Tanzania, and are about to run another training in Johannesburg in November. Applications for that are now closed, but if you have a need to attend one of these for the purposes of training others, contact us, and we will try and make a space for you or at least add you to the waiting list.

Our first mini-workshop at the University of Cape Town in 2010

Other organisations in other part of the world do similar trainings to us. A great example is the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, who have just hosted a training for the their organisation and collaborators. In their training they covered Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps API. A great example of training others within a group collaborating towards a common goal is the Citizen Mapper site. For slightly different approaches to training within a single organization (for those of you looking to train within  a more educational setting), have a look at the KCK Saturday Academy site (integrating Google Geo tool trainings in a high-school leadership training programme) and the Desktop Mapping site at Eastern Washington’s University online GIS certificate programme.

Online tutorials and user guides

If it’s not possible for you to attend in-person training, there is still a wealth of helpful materials to help you acquire the necessary knowledge.  Most of what you’re likely to need for getting yourself up to speed on various mapping tools you’ll find on the Google Earth Outreach tutorial page, the Fusion Table tutorial page, and theGoogle Earth user-guide.  You may also wish to have a look at the Google MapMakerpedia site (MapMakerpedia is a new crowsdsourced guide for Google Map Maker that features lessons, articles, and tutorials), the SketchUp self-paced tutorials or if you’re looking to be more technical, the KML tutorial for developers and Maps API tutorial.

Rather than blindly starting at one end and working your way through the tutorials, it may help you to use Google Earth Outreach’s trainers’ materials (more on that below) to work through these resources within a structure that you can then use to train others.

Training Others

Within your organisation or institution, you may have quite specific training requirements. Perhaps you’re only interested in teaching your colleagues about Google Earth, or you may want to collaborate on a Fusion Table or Google Map. Whatever the case may be, chances are that the best place to start will be at Google Earth Outreach’s trainer’s corner.

The trainer’s corner is a collection of training resources  specifically aimed at organisations’ and institutions interested in training people in the public benefit sector in using Google Mapping tools.

In the trainer’s corner, you’ll find suggested agendas for different length and types of workshops, a list of training videos and links to them, links to Google Geo-related resources and articles,  and the option to request training materials.  Upon requesting this material, Outreach will send you a training pack, comprising  Power Point slides for use with your training, technique tours in Google Earth, a workbook that you can share with your participants, and your guide through this material and an incredibly useful preparation tool: the trainer’s script.

A screenshot from the trainer's script.

Even if you’ve never run a training of any kind before, the trainer’s script is a pretty fail-proof way of planning your training. It will help you think about the resources and preparation time you need for your trainings,  set the pace of your workshop, and will give you a really good idea of what to cover and how to deliver it.  Even if you have to go off script and adapt topics for your specific organisation or project, working through the training script upfront will install a framework to hang these off that are almost guaranteed to achieve success.

By requesting training material and delivering a workshop you will also have the option of joining the trainer’s forum, a group where trainers get to share their experiences and resources and ask their questions.  If you join the forum you will also receive announcements about Google product launches and updates, Google Earth Outreach training materials and learn about best practices and tips for training in Google mapping tools.

A really nice compliment to the trainer’s corner (depending on the topics that you’re interested in covering) is the Fusion Table trainer site, Map Makerpedia tutorials, the Map your world community site, SketchUp’s Trainer page, and the Google Earth for Educators page. Like the trainers corner, these websites offer curriculums, presentations, tutorials and instructions for hosting a training and/or Map Maker Party.

It may also be really helpful to have a look at the workshop sites of organisations and groups (like the ones we mentioned earlier in the post) to get a feel for the kind of material that would suit your organisation and purpose. Have a look, for example, as Google Earth Outreach’s IGG and Vancouver training sites, our Western Cape and Arusha workshop sites, the Golden Gate National Parks conservancy training site, the Citizen Mapper site and the Desktop Mapping page we mentioned earlier.

We hope that this blog post will help you think of how to go about teaching your colleagues and collaborators in making the most of Google’s free and easy mapping tools. If you would like to talk to us about trainings, feel free to contact us at mapaworkshops@gmail.com – we’d love to help as far as we can, hear about your next training and would love to learn from you too!

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On our map, you’ll find a few different “categories” of conservation activities. There are the green hands that show protected areas, the orange blobs that highlight conservation blogs, and the blue Ps that denote conservation projects. And then there are critical habitats.

Critical habitats are areas like biodiversity hotspots, endemic bird areas, global200 ecoregions and Ramsar wetlands, and are represented on the map by the logo of the organisation that is chiefly responsible for defining, monitoring and sometimes implementing these areas.

Sometimes these areas span entire provinces, sometimes they’re the size of a small wetland.  Some of them overlap with protected areas, but often times, they’re entirely unprotected. Different critical habitats are defined by applying different measures of biodiversity richness and focus on different ecological aspects, but in identifying them, conservation scientists and organisations have a common goal: ensure that we protect as much as possible of our natural heritage by prioritising areas that are particularly species rich and valuable.

BirdLife International’s important bird areas programme is no different in this respect, and with more than 10, 000 sites identified worldwide, it plays a pivotal role in directing global conservation effort,  and not only those efforts focused on looking after feathered creatures.

A map showing all Africa's IBAs. Download the IBA-only map below or visit our conservation map to explore them in context.

Officially, an important bird area is an area that hold significant numbers of one or more threatened species, is one of a set of sites that together hold a suite of restricted range or biome-restricted species, or hosts exceptionally large numbers of migratory or congregatory species. When it comes to IBAs, size does matter! They need to big enough to matter, small enough to be able to be conserved in their entirety.

This is particularly important for sites that are not yet protected, and whose designation as an IBA help the conservationists who work in these areas petition their improved petition status. In Angola, for example, conservation scientists are currently petitioning the Angolan government to declare the Mount Moco IBA  a special reserve, an action that will help protect some of Angola’s last remaining Afromontane forest patches, and the rare and specialized birds that depend on them.

As of this week, you can see important bird areas on MAPA’s  searchable African conservation map, as well as on our Google Earth map. Find out where these areas are, what it is that makes them special and what bird species you can find there.  Each site links to the detailed important bird area fact sheet (like this one, for Mount Moco), where you can find out even more about specific sites.  If you would like to see a map of only IBAs,  you can download a Google layer of that here. We hope you enjoy exploring!

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After our workshops in the Western Cape and Arusha earlier this year, many conservation organisations and individuals asked us to bring our Google Geo tool workshops to more areas.  So today we’re very excited to announce that we will be running two sets of workshops to Johannesburg in November, this time in collaboration with the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

To ensure that we can accommodate as many conservation scientists, managers, communicators and other practitioners, we will run two sets of workshops, one from the 14^th to the 16^th and the second from the 17^th to the 19^thof November. Not a GIS expert or tech wiz? No problem! All you need is a laptop, willingness to learn and a need to visualise your work.

The three day workshops will run from the EWT head offices in Modderfontein, Johannesburg and will focus on using Google’s mapping technology and it’s applications in conservation. We will also introduce you to MAPA’s searchable map of African conservation and show you how to use it for your benefit. The workshop will be  very practical and interactive and, on the third day, participants will have the opportunity to design and work on their own maps and visualisations.

Interested? Then head over to our workshop site to get your application in and find out more about the topics that we’ll be covering in the trainings. Hurry – applications close on the 14^th of October!

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