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The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is proud to announce that A Fight for Survival: Isolated Indigenous Peoples of South America, created in partnership with the International Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact (GTI-PIACI), has been named the Winner in the Environment category of the 2025 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition, hosted by Esri.
The StoryMap traces the realities faced by an estimated 188 groups of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation across the Amazon and Gran Chaco — communities who have chosen to live without sustained contact with the outside world, often as a direct result of histories marked by violence, disease, and displacement. Their survival is inseparable from the integrity of their territories, which today face mounting pressure from mining, logging, and road construction.
“Maps help to show how PIACI territories encompass some of the best-conserved ecosystems in the region and how development threats are encroaching on those areas, threatening the well-being of PIACI and ecosystem stability vital for maintaining global climate stability,” said Brian Hettler, Director of Mapping at ACT.
Esri recognized the StoryMap for its skillful use of scale and dynamic mapping to convey the relationship between isolated peoples’ existence and the conservation of the region’s biodiversity. Judges highlighted its excellence in map scale and extent, visual design, multilingual accessibility, and a compelling call to action.
“ACT worked with Indigenous organizations and civil-society allies from GTI-PIACI to compile the first complete maps of isolated Indigenous peoples across South America.” Brian Hettler, Director of Mapping at ACT
This recognition reflects ACT’s longstanding commitment to using geospatial technology in service of Indigenous rights and forest conservation. The StoryMap was developed alongside Indigenous monitoring networks that are often the first to detect changes in and around isolated peoples’ territories — and who uphold a shared principle at the heart of this work: No Contact.
A Fight for Survival is available in multiple languages and can be explored here.
