Today I came across this amazing initiative mapforenvironment.org, lying at the boundary between environmental activism and mapping geekness. Obviously I couldn’t be writing about anything else right now!

Mapping for Environment is a crow-sourcing platform where a community of volunteers from all over the world join forces to help protecting the forests, rivers and threatened ecosystems in our planet. They look at satellite imagery to identify previously unmapped features such as roads or buildings, indicative of human activity or track changes in forest areas with time. Map for Environment combines OpenStreetMap mapping tools with open-source satellite imagery and location data of known logging, industrial agriculture, dam, and fracking locations to create detailed maps of infrastructure, size, as well as communities impacted. Mapped data is shared on OpenStreetMap by the users and will also available on Maphubs.

Helping is easy, you only need to create an account on OpenStreetMap and follow one of the short tutorial that will help you through the process. No previous experience at mapping is required. There are different projects where you can collaborate. Give it a go, start mapping and make a difference!