Speaking about progress – here’s what you can expect to see on the newest version of the map, and what we’ve been up to since March:

Countries and Protected areas added

We’ve now completed the entire African National Park network and have added more than 300 new bubbles to the map.  We’ve also included even more links to information on areas that are also important bird areas or key biodiversity areas. Although we focused on the National Parks to start of with, we’re committed to ultimately putting all Africa’s protected areas on the map.  Have we skipped an area that you have information are or think should be on the map? Please let us know!

A new way to view Polygons

In the last version of the layer, the polygons and roads for protected areas were visible upon loading the layer.  These data have now been included in the project bubble itself (see below). Clicking on “click to see more” button  will lay down the polygon and roads for that protected area and will zoom you into the points, blogs and projects for that area. Whereas we had completed mapping southern and east Africa before starting to build the later, mapping for central and west Africa has only just started. This means that for many areas we still have very incomplete road- and polygon- data. Can you help to complete the map? Or are you interested in volunteering to do of some of the mapping in these areas? Click  here to find out more…spots are rapidly being filled up.

Better Content for East and Southern Africa

We’ve edited all the content from east and southern Africa, and in some cases have replaced content completely. Thanks to contributions from third parties, we’ve been able to improve information and polygons from several protected areas, including the Baviaanskloof Mega Reserve and Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique.

More Projects:

We’ve been holding off on putting projects up whilst we were improving our third party technology – we hope that it is now much easier to add a project to the database. Please let us know your thoughts! There are several exciting developments in store for projects…more on this later. In the mean time, have a look at the 85 projects or so that have already been added to the layer. Thank you to all who have already added content!

More “footprint” stories in Google Earth

One aspect of the layer that we are really excited about is the ability for people to tell the stories of their study sites and species and the plights they face on Google Earth. These stories include Google Earth tours, Image overlays, mini-layers and GPS tracks. We call these stories “footprints” – wherever you see the little footprint (as shown below), you can click to see a spatial story in Google Earth.

If you like this content, and you wonder how you can create stories like these for your project, you can get started on doing this right away!It’s easy, and Google Earth Outreach has created a series of really easy tutorials that will guide you step by step in achieving the story you wish to tell.

Google Earth/Maps Workshops

Speaking of creating content in Google Earth – on the 7th of May we held our first Google Earth/Maps training with eight conservationists (and a few other people listening in) at the University of Cape Town.  As far as possible we stuck to examples that the attendees were familiar with: their own work!

If you want to see who attended the workshop, what we got up to, and what material we created in and after the workshop, you can visit our workshop site here. You’ll find links to all the tutorials we worked through in the workshop, as well as links to many more resources from Google Earth Outreach.

We’re planning a host of workshops later this year in the Western Cape, South Africa. If you’re interested in attending these, or receiving updates about when and where these will take place, please let us know!

Collaborations across Africa and the world

We keep saying that the story of conservation in Africa is not MAPA’s story to tell – and we stand by that! Over the last few months we’ve been befriending the master story tellers – NGOs and individuals who work across the continent in African Conservation.

In addition, we recently attended the 24^th ICCB in Edmonton, Canada where our goal was to introduce the project to the conservation community, and seek advice as how to we might develop it further to become useful to conservation practitioners working across Africa. We came away from the meeting encouraged that the project is addressing two pressing needs in conservation: to organize information on conservation actions and to visualize conservation effort and translate dry information to policy makers and the general public.

How do we plan to do this? We want to build a layer that enables conservation practitioners to tell the story of conservation areas and actions in Africa to the world, but also to each other. We are busy adding additional fields to our project input screens, and turning the database into a searchable resource for conservationists,  standardizing actions into categories of threats, action types, habitats, species studies, project capacity, affiliations etc. which could be used as search criteria to find conservation actions and areas.  The layer will still be the public face of these actions, and in addition to the big layer with everything on it, we’re also hoping to allow people to create their own, customized layers by turning the results of their search queries and filters into a Google Earth file.  We’ll keep you updated about these developments!

Thank you!

As always…the project is completely dependent on the involvement of Africa’s conservation community. A big that you to everyone who has pitched in so far! A special thank you to the folks from Google and Google Earth Outreach for their support and help. Please let us know your comments and suggestions…and check back for more developments on the projects regularly.

- The MAPA Project team

The latest edition, available here, carries an article on the MAPA Project.  Here is an excerpt:

“However hard you look, you won’t find a website that tells you everything you want to know about Africa’s parks and wildlife reserves. That’s surprising since this continent is the only one with significant populations of large mammals – the so-called megafauna.

There are a few of reasons why no-one can tell you how many parks there are, or what’s in them, but the most important one is that no-one knows.

The MAPA Project was initiated in an attempt to put that right. In association with Google Earth (probably the best online mapmakers), Tracks4Africa (probably Africa’s best GPS mapmakers), and conservationists all over Africa, this project hopes to change the way the world sees this continent….”

Read the full story here

Eric came down to South Africa for training earlier this month and he and I mapped almost the whole of the Pilanseberg National Park in about 24 hours as a training exercise!

Eric and Dennis have been on the road for over a week, doing as much hiking as driving because that is the nature of most Cameroonian reserves.    It has not been easy and is reminder of how ward we will have to work throughout West Africa.  They have got some great data so far but things have got a bit sticky recently!  Sorry no pictures, they are all still in the field.  Anyway, I’ll let Eric speak for himself….

Hi March,
how are you doing today? Hope fine.

We are now back in Buea to do the Mount Cameroon National Park and the Bakossi Hills. It was quite difficult for us in Bayang Mbo as the rains have all entry into the sanctuary impossible. We were told researchers only go there during the dry season as a river with no bridge inside the sanctuary over flows its banks during the rainy season making entry impossible. We at least did some mapping of the entry and research head quarters as well as the road that leads to the sanctuary.

In Takamanda National Park, it was even worse. First, it is a new park that was created in 2008 and has no infrastructure, no camps and no gate as most of the parks in these forest areas. Then the villagers living around and inside the park have become very hostile. They told us the government promised them roads, schools, health centers, etc when they took their farm lands to make the park but they have not seen anything ever since and would not allow anybody to move into the park.   Even WCS that has been working in the park has been expelled and have not been able to move in for six months now. When i was about to take a photo of the entry sign board, they arrested me saying i have come to steal their property for the white man and we had to pay a fine of 2000frs cfa in order for them to let me go.

We did contact some guys who work for the ministry and they promised to give us the information we want on Bayang Mbo, Takamanda and Korup. For Korup we already have a good map with a lot of details but no GPS coordinates. We hope to get them here in Buea as they promised.  File 20100819 is for Korup National Park; 20100821 & Rough GPS coordinates from Conservator are for Bayang Mbo and 20100822 for Takamanda.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a nice day.
Eric

Cartography 2.0: Volunteers Help map Africa as Never Before

A high-tech mapping project canvasses the African bush

The lioness coughed, and Mark Eveleigh looked up from his laptop. There were seven of them, 400 pounds each—that’s 2,800 pounds of feline—staring right at him. Eveleigh was in northern Uganda helping create a map of Africa, and like so many before him, he was risking his life in the name of cartography. But unlike those early explorers, Eveleigh traveled with a satellite uplink and a GPS—not an astrolabe…

Read the full article here

This week, MAPA is very far from any African action or area…we’re all the way across the world in Edmonton, Canada at the 24th annual International Congress for Conservation Biology.

So what are we doing here? Why bother flying halfway across the world?

We’ve said this to distraction: we firmly believe that the MAPA Project will not be sustainable, accurate and relevant unless it is ultimately authored by people doing the work in the field: conservationists themselves. So we came to the biggest meeting of conservation professionals on the planet to introduce our project to this community, and ask for their help in developing it.

At the same time, we’ve realized that there are many people in other parts of the world trying to do much the same as we are – there can be no doubt that there is a pressing need to organize information in conservation and visualize it to the public, policy makers, conservation managers – and each other. We came to learn from everyone who is in this business of visualizing and organizing conservation information – and so far we are barely keeping up.

To give a (very brief!) introduction to the project I delivered a four minute speed-presentation on Sunday morning. The PowerPoint of this presentation can be downloaded here. If you are at the conference – we’d love to talk to you. Please send me an email at alta@mapaproject.org or find me in the exhibit hall at tea or during lunch if you have comments, suggestions, a project to put up, information on protected areas or if you have any questions about the project whatsoever.

Click on the “Volunteer Now!” menu option at the top (or left hand side) of this page to read more.

You can download an application form from the Volunteer Now! page.  If you have any questions please contact me via the Contact Us page.

Look forward to hearing from plenty of you.

Cheers

March Turnbull

We are very pleased to announce that those problems are now a thing of the past. Here are some changes that you can expect to see:

Automatic Registration

In the past you’ve had to email us for a username and password. You can now do this automatically (here), enabling you to log in immediately to add your project record.

See your own content

One problem we ran into fairly soon was that it was difficult to find your own content in between everyone else’s on the database. Now when you log in you’ll be taken to your contributions (see below). You can still associate wildlife species, organizations, videos, articles and blogs added by other people. We are working on making it easier to find content amongst this content too.

Add videos, wildlife, footprints, articles and organizations easily

To add rich content (like videos) to your bubble you had to log out of your record and go to the listing of that content type, before returning to your project record to associate it. You now no longer have to log out of your record, and can move easily between the different tabs to add wildlife species, articles, footprints, videos and organizations to your project bubble.

New activation routine

To make sure that we only get conservation added to the layer, we set up the database  so that every record added needed to be authorized by an administrator before appearing on Google Earth. The problem was that one a project was added, it would disappear to the user until activated by an administrator.  In creating the “my contributions” page, we have done away with this step from a user’s point of view. Your project won’t appear on the “live layer” (this is not up yet, but will be very soon) until activated by an administrator, but you can edit your content as much as you like.

More help material

In an attempt to make the database more user-friendly, we have embedded instructions in the database itself. We hope that this will make it possible for people to quickly and easily create their bubbles without having to read through tedious instructions. We do appreciate that instructions may still be useful, though, so we have made a revised PDF document and a slideshow available to you on this website.

We hope that you find these changes helpful! Please let us know what you like and don’t like about the new-look database, and feel free to suggest other ways in which we can make it easier for third parties to add projects.  We have plenty in store for the database, the layer and the website over the next few months, and we’ll keep you updated as to those developments. More news soon!

However, in the process of building the pin-board (with enormous assistance from Google Earth Outreach , we might add), we’ve been introduced to many great ways to tell stories on Google Earth, and we wanted to share these tools with other conservationists.   Not only for them to tell their stories on the MAPA layer, but also on their websites and blogs, in public talks, presentations and reports.

With this in mind, and armed with the Google Earth- and -Maps training we received in Kampala and Nairobi in October and November last year, we put together our first mini-training with a small group of local conservationists at the University of Cape Town.

On the 7th of May we introduced these eight conservationists (and a few other people listening in) to the basics of creating content in Google Earth and Google Maps. As far as possible we stuck to examples that the attendees were familiar with: their own work!

Just add conservationists. The venue just before the start of training.

Erick showing us how to add GIS content into Google Earth.

In the workshop we covered the basics of navigating in Google Earth, annotating Google Earth with points, lines and polygons and dressing these up with pictures and videos. We added image-, photo- and screen overlays, and learned how to create narrated tours in Google Earth (like the example below – one that we actually started creating in the workshop).

Later in the day we also spent some more hands-on time in Google Maps and Fusion tables, with two very basic exercises in using Google My Maps to create a custom map, and Fusion tables to merge two datasets and map primate field sites in Africa. We also spent some time learning how to embed content created in Google Earth, Google Maps and Fusion tables in websites and blogs.

If you want to see who attended the workshop, what we got up to, and what material we created in and after the workshop, you can visit our workshop site here. You’ll find links to all the tutorials we worked through in the workshop, as well as links to many more resources from Google Earth Outreach.

Are you interested in knowing how to use Google Earth to illustrate your conservation project or area? Contact us and let us know – we can’t promise to host a workshop in your neighborhood (we’ll try!), but at a minimum we will be more than happy to help you create your story, and point you in the direction of more help material.

If you already have material in. kml- or .kmz format, why not upload it as part of your project to the MAPA layer? When you add a project, we will give you the option to associate a “footprint”, which can be any content that tells a story in Google Earth…be it an image overlay, a tour, an animal track, a species range or even a mini layer!

A final note from our side:  Thank you to everybody who participated in the workshop, especially Andrea Plos who made sure that technical hiccups didn’t scupper the day. Also a big thank you to Julie Sohn from Google and the Google Outreach team for their incredible support in helping us to pull off the first of hopefully many interactive days with conservationists working across Africa.

The people working in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique saw Gorongosa on the layer and wanted to improve it. So they went and did just that, providing us with new polygons for the park, and adding more videos and text to the bubbles. Once we go live (more on that soon) the information you see for Gorongosa National Park will be the information added by the people from Gorongosa National Park. A big thank you to Franziska Steinbruck and Vasco Galante for getting in touch with us.

Another example of conservationists showing us the way, is Silvia Weel who contacted us from the PRESENCE initiative - a trans-disciplinary catchment restoration initiative in the Baviaanskloof Mega-reserve involving, amongst others, the Dutch Government, Working for Wetlands/Water/Woodlands, several South African universities, and the Eastern Cape Parks. The Baviaanskloof Mega-reserve wasn’t even on the MAPA layer when Silvia first contacted us. Thanks to her that has now been remedied. Silvia also added all the work that PRESENCE do as a project to the database. This too will be on the new layer.

Another conservationists that has talking to MAPA recently is Louis Liebenberg, of Cybertracker fame. CyberTracker has done some amazing work in the field of animal tracking, their free software having been downloaded more than 40000 times in over 190 countries.  Louis recently attended our Google Earth/Google Maps workshop, and was encouraged by the possibilities of the MAPA layer as an information portal. Thanks to some really encouraging discussions with him, we have now been armed with many great ideas on how we could use the layer and the database as an information tool and make them more interactive. By the way – we’ll give you a full low-down on the workshop soon – an event we very much enjoyed.

These stories are merely a selection of all the help and input that we have received, and they illustrate what MAPA is all about – a collaborative effort to tell the story of conservation in Africa. As more people are climbing on board we are finding areas that we can improve on, new ideas for how to apply the project for more people’s benefit and more ways in which conservationists can communicate and work together. Please contact us with your comments, ideas, suggestions, and problems. Add your conservation project, encourage others to add theirs and help us develop a way for conservationists to talk to each other and the world about the work they do to preserve Africa’s priceless natural heritage.

One of the most time-consuming things on this project has been establishing partnerships with national wildlife authorities.  Getting the appointments, exchanging letters of co-operation, and everything else that goes with it, all takes time and money.   It’s always worth it in the end because we get so much support from Wardens and Rangers on the ground – but the paperwork and protocol and can be exhausting!  One way to fast track the process is to collaborate with a local NGO which has national credibility and the contacts.

A fragment of protected forest near Lagos, Nigeria

So we have been very lucky to be working with the Nigerian Conservation Foundation in Nigeria.   They are the most senior conservation NGO in the country and have taken a huge load off our shoulders.  When I visited Lagos recently, they undertook to manage all liaison with the  Nigeria National Parks Service and to support the project on the ground.

Once again I am reminded by how many people there are on this continent who are cheerfully shouldering the immense responsibility of looking after its wildlife – and still have time to help others!

Damola Ogunsesan at Lekki Conservation Centre, Headquarters of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation.

MAPA will work in Nigeria, with two dedicated vehicles, in November 2010.  We look forward to meeting again!

Regards,

March Turnbull