From Maps to Action: How Participatory Mapping Can Strengthen Community Leadership
At Climate Week NYC, Amazon Conservation Team, Esri, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and Solutions Insights Lab explored how community-generated data can support conservation, territorial rights, disaster response, and local decision-making. Maps can show where a forest stands, where a river runs, or where a community’s territory begins. Participatory mapping can do even more: it can help…
Mapping for Protection: Safeguarding Indigenous Peoples Living in Voluntary Isolation
At Climate Week NYC, Indigenous leaders and conservation practitioners discussed how mapping and technology can help protect Indigenous Peoples Living in Voluntary Isolation while respecting their right to remain unseen. Indigenous Peoples Living in Voluntary Isolation have chosen to maintain distance from wider society, often as a way of protecting their lives, cultures, and territories…
Find us at Climate Week in NYC
The Amazon Conservation Team will be at Climate Week in New York discussing community-led solutions to rainforest conservation. We’ll be hosting two insightful panels, both related to mapping alongside Indigenous communities to protect cultures and ecosystems. Whether you plan to attend the event in New York or just want to learn more about our work related…
A Lifesaving Health Campaign for the Matsés
Along the remote Peru-Brazil border, the Matsés Indigenous people continue to uphold a traditional way of life deeply connected to the Amazon rainforest. Their territories — the Matsés Indigenous Territory and the Matsés National Reserve — span approximately 852,000 hectares (2.1 million acres) of pristine forest. The future of this remarkable landscape is inseparable…
How Maps Reveal a Changing Amazon
Mapping threats in the Amazon Maps imply some form of permanence and recognition. If something has been “put on the map”, it means that it will get noticed, and be there for years to come. For the Amazon Conservation Team’s (ACT’s) conservation work in the Amazon and along coastlines, getting places in the official geographic…
Every Restoration Begins with a Seed
Discover the Agrobiodiversity in Tocantins project, an initiative that brings together productive landscape restoration, Indigenous knowledge, and territorial protection. Restoring a territory requires more than recovering degraded land. It means protecting water sources, helping biodiversity thrive, strengthening food production, and ensuring that future generations inherit territories rich in life, biodiversity, culture, and memory. For Indigenous…
Mapping with Indigenous and local communities to help protect the Amazon
Brian Hettler, a geographer and cartographer with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), works with Indigenous communities in South America on participatory mapping initiatives that support indigenous land rights and rainforest conservation. Maps are more than collections of geographic coordinates or lines representing roads or country borders. They can be an expression of a community’s culture, territory, and…
The Nadëb and Kanamary Peoples Launch Territorial and Environmental Management Plans (PGTAs), Reinforcing a Collective Commitment to Protecting Their Territories and Upholding Their Rights
On July 7, 2026, Indigenous leaders, representatives of civil society organizations, public agencies, and partner institutions gathered in Manaus in the Brazilian state of Amazonas to celebrate the launch of the Territorial and Environmental Management Plans (PGTAs) for the Paraná do Boá-Boá and Uneiuxi Indigenous Territories. Developed by the Indigenous Peoples themselves over years of dialogue and collective planning, the documents represent more than management…
How Technology Is Empowering Indigenous-Led Coastal Conservation
Insights from Juan Carlos Cruz, Manager, Science & Conservation, ACT’s Ancestral Tides Program When people think about conservation technology, they often picture satellite transmitters, GPS devices, drones, or digital mapping. But for the Amazon Conservation Team’s (ACT’s) Ancestral Tides program, technology is only part of the story. Across the coasts of Latin America, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are , with…
Celebrating 30 Years: A Path That Began in the Amazon Continues to Expand
This year, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is celebrating 30 years of biocultural conservation, an approach that recognizes the protection of local and Indigenous knowledge and culture go hand in hand with protecting the Earth’s most critical ecosystems. And the conservation solutions led by these communities are as diverse as the cultures and geographic regions…