Crafting conservation stories

The communities are the protagonists. And that's the key part.

For the past 12 years, Brian Hettler has led mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the  Amazon Conservation Team .

Working in close collaboration with Indigenous communities, Brian has led participatory mapping initiatives in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Suriname, and Guyana to create cultural maps that record and preserve traditional knowledge and support Indigenous rights and community-based conservation efforts. Brian also leads the Amazon Conservation Team's efforts to map and monitor Isolated Indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest using high-resolution satellite imagery; this work was featured in the  February 2019 issue of Scientific American .

Brian supports a diverse, interdisciplinary mapping team of approximately 20 people across South America in the use of maps and field data-collection tools and methodologies that support conservation efforts. The  Living Territories  story was created in close collaboration with the Amazon Conservation Team Colombia and contributions from the following team members:

• Carolina Gil – Director, ACT Colombia
• Linda García - Coordinator, Land Titling Program, ACT Colombia
• María Paula Kairuz – Biologist & GIS Professional, ACT Colombia
• David Delgado – Land Titling Professional, ACT Colombia
• Germán Mejía - Monitoring & GIS, Isolated Indigenous Protection Program, ACT Colombia
• Alvaro Gil – Graphic Designer, ACT Colombia
• Mateo Medina – Communications Professional, ACT Colombia
• Libardo Chanchy - Agroecological Engineer & GIS Professional, ACT Colombia
• Judah Marsden – Associate, Communications, ACT US
• Pascual Gonzalez - Coordinator, Mapping & GIS, ACT US
• Jessica Villamil – Geographer, Putumayo Program, Colombia, ACT Colombia

The story won the IUCN Indigenous Peoples Governance and Rights Award in the 2023 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition and was also named overall runner-up in one of the tracks.

How did you first come to combine storytelling with GIS and spatial analysis?

My first experiences with “storytelling with maps” really started with participatory mapping work with Indigenous communities.

In these mapping projects, we use maps as a facilitation tool to talk with communities about how they perceive their territories, what kinds of problems they are facing, and what future they envision for themselves. Community members share their different perspectives and stories by making their own maps. The elders—often the few remaining keepers of traditional knowledge—are usually eager to share their extensive knowledge, which can be preserved by the communities in self-made maps intended for internal use.

The maps provide a common language and place for sharing stories, facilitating communication within the communities and helping to bridge cultural divides between elders and young Indigenous peoples, or between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

When Esri launched its storytelling platform years ago, it seemed like a great fit to help ACT share our story and stories from our local partners. The focus on maps is ideal for clearly communicating the geographic scope of conservation and land rights initiatives. The many options to integrate photos and videos alongside the maps are great for conveying the amazing cultural and biological diversity of South America.

At ACT, we saw the potential and adopted ArcGIS StoryMaps as a key part of our communication strategy. The ready-made templates, wealth of customization options, and easy-to-use builder has allowed our field-focused organization to create high quality communications products that help share our organization’s message and story.

How did you find out about the competition and what motivated you to participate in it?

The team had the story idea before the ArcGIS StoryMaps competition was announced. We had wanted to convey what territory and land rights mean to Indigenous communities and had been working on the initial stages of the story for some time.

When the 2023 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition was announced,  Living Territories  seemed like an ideal fit for the theme of the competition and a great opportunity to further highlight the importance of land rights and critical role of Indigenous people in conservation.

What would you say  Living Territories  is really about?

Indigenous and local communities across South America have faced intense colonization pressures for centuries, resulting in the loss of their ancestral territories and the destruction of ecosystems critical for preserving biodiversity and slowing climate change. Securing rights to their territories often significantly improves the overall well-being of Indigenous communities and is a vital strategy to strengthen regional conservation efforts, with legally titled Indigenous lands often showing lower deforestation rates than even national parks.

We designed  Living Territories  to share stories about the amazing perseverance of local Indigenous communities in resisting historical colonization trends and to communicate the importance of communities finally securing territorial land rights over the past decade. Through interactive maps, we show how many community-based conservation efforts come together to positively impact environmental management practices at a regional level.

Once you had your idea for  Living Territories , how did you bring it to life? What did your storytelling process look like, and how did you make decisions about narrative, visuals, and design?

We began the project by interviewing ACT field staff, including the land titling team and coordinators from each of the geographies. One of the most important team members on this project was Linda García, the coordinator of our Land Titling Program in Colombia, whose extensive experience helping to create and expand Indigenous Reserves throughout the country provided key orientation for the story.

To build a story of this scale, we brought together a multidisciplinary group of GIS experts, graphic designers, and communications professionals. Our communications team helped identify key messages from interviews with ACT field staff and Indigenous partners. Our graphic design team created a style guide with custom colors and fonts and compiled a multimedia library for the project. Our mapping (GIS) team built digital maps following the style guide and optimizing loading speeds as much as possible to ensure smooth map choreography.

In terms of visuals, we begin each story with some eye-catching photographs to hook people right away and to establish the cultural and environmental richness of the places we work. We like to establish a visual rhythm of striking photos followed by maps that provide more in-depth information. It is important to have content available at different accessibility levels where some readers get a basic idea of the story, while other readers can click links and learn more if they are interested.

How did your process include local or Indigenous communities? Do you have any recommendations for collaborative storytelling and ensuring local voices are represented and heard?

The Amazon Conservation Team, as an organization, really tries to highlight community voices. The communities are the protagonists. And that's the key part.

As our team in Colombia helped create and expand Indigenous Reserves, they interviewed local community members to learn what “territory” means to them, and the significance of finally securing land rights after decades of persistent efforts. These interviews provided important understanding of the communities’ perspectives and guided us on how to develop the narrative themes in each geography.

ACT-Colombia recorded these interviews, and we integrated those audio clips into the story in sections titled “Voices from the Territory.” We felt it was important for the reader to hear directly from local Indigenous peoples — sometimes in Indigenous languages — and used text, audio and photos to convey the perspectives of these local community members, while also placing them on the map.

There are many sensitivities around some of the topics discussed in the story. We always want to ensure that we are communicating respectfully and in an appropriate way. The close working relationships of our local teams with Indigenous communities and organizations helps ensure we keep communities at the center of the stories.

How did ArcGIS StoryMaps allow you to tell your story in a way traditional methodologies could not?

With ArcGIS StoryMaps, we are able to show — via maps and integrated multimedia — the historical context of how external pressures have fragmented Indigenous territories, and how restoring those territories to Indigenous communities can help connect existing reserves and protected areas to form biocultural conservation corridors.

Seeing that on a map is very impactful.

What is your favorite feature in the ArcGIS StoryMaps builder to work with?

We really love the  sidecar block . It’s so powerful to display text over scrolling images and interactive maps with text annotations and images combined.

For  Living Territories , we also experimented with the different features available in ArcGIS Online. The interactive maps use a custom ACT base map that we designed in the Vector Tile Style editor. The ability to place media layers on a web map, and include the map in our story, enabled us to literally place these community members on the map, which is kind of a metaphor or allegory for how land titling is putting them on the map.

What was the biggest challenge in your storytelling process? 

In  Living Territories , one of our biggest challenges was condensing a great deal of complex information into an accessible length and format. How could we introduce the complex topic of land rights, make it interesting, and keep people reading the narratives on these communities?

It was challenging to communicate about four very different geographies, and to do so in a succinct manner, especially when providing historical context really helps highlight the importance of the land rights achievements. How could we structure the story to include the geographies and themes important to each unique community? We needed a strong narrative and optimized text as well as a consistent map design visually across the geographies, but with enough flexibility to reflect regional differences.

What advice would you give to other storytellers?

There are a few important things that I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, with ArcGIS StoryMaps projects.

I think it's helpful to take a combined approach —  outline your story draft  for some structure, and then get into the ArcGIS StoryMaps builder and try out ideas as you go.

Take your general outline and experiment with the blocks. Use text and media and maps. Move them around and find a structure and flow that you can repeat across the story. As you add more content, see how it fits into the builder and how it looks across various devices. It’s about finding the right combination of structure and flexibility.  

I recommend the same approach with your maps. Before you’re too deeply invested in one style or type, try out 2D and 3D maps, static and interactive maps. Check them on different devices. It's easy to have an idea in your mind and then realize it's not going to work as well as you thought. It’s good to find out earlier rather than later. 

And again, involve a multidisciplinary team. Don’t try to do it all yourself.  It's very important to involve other people and provide different perspectives outside of the mapping team — from communications professionals to graphic designers to community coordinators in the field.   

Is there anything else you’d like to share about  Living Territories ?

Soon, we’ll have a Spanish version of  Living Territories  that will have slightly adjusted content aimed at audiences in Colombia. For example, it will include links to accessible descriptions of Constitutional Court decisions that are relevant to legal rights of communities described in the stories.

In addition to  Living Territories , which is a fun, narrative story about the importance of Indigenous land rights, ACT has also developed more technical resources about land rights in Colombia that integrate geoportals and interactive dashboards. We’ve built a system to compile and analyze land rights data from the National Lands Agency in Colombia to more easily provide up-to-date data, key statistics, and analysis about land rights processes across the country.

What are some other projects you’re excited about right now?

In addition to Living Territories, we have several other ACT storytelling projects that I’m excited about right now.

We are partnering with the Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia, to build a virtual museum exhibit using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Titled  Palabras de Vida: Una investigation participativa de la collection del Museo Etnográfico de Leticia deeds las miradas indígenas , the project is the first Indigenous-led research project into the Museum’s collections, representing an important shift in perspective on objects first collected and described by Christian missionaries in the 1960s and 1970s.

The virtual exhibit uses photographs of museum objects as media layers placed in ArcGIS Online web maps to facilitate an interactive exploration of the objects, providing links to specific details and permitting the user to zoom in and explore details and textures. We released the Spanish-language version of the collection in late 2023, and we’re hoping to launch a version in English in 2024.

 Living Territories  and a few other stories are featured on  our website  including:

•  Legalization of Indigenous Territories in Colombia: Advances in the Consolidation of Biocultural Corridors 
•  Violated Collective Rights: The multidimensional impact of extractive and infrastructure projects 
•  25 Years of Biocultural Conservation: The Amazon Conservation Team’s 25 ^th  Anniversary 

This year, we also will release a new version of  The Amazonian Travels of Richard Evans Schultes . This was one of ACT’s first stories, created in 2016 with the classic Esri Story Maps templates and then updated in 2019. The new version, likely to be issued this summer, will move the content to the current ArcGIS StoryMaps platform.

Outside of stories, this year, the Amazon Conservation Team is assuming a leadership role in an international working group for the protection of Isolated Indigenous Peoples, a critical human rights issue in South America. Mapping plays a critical role in this work, as we use satellite imagery to confirm the presence of isolated peoples so their territories can be better protected, while also monitoring for potentially dangerous territorial invasions from illegal mining.

I’m also looking forward to traveling to Guyana, South America, for mapping and storytelling workshops with Manushi communities. It’s a really interesting scenario where communities have lost a lot of their traditional knowledge over the years and are trying to revitalize aspects of their culture, with maps as an important part of that story.