South American Wildlands and Biodiversity needs volunteers to help identify, describe, and protect wildland complexes and roadless areas in South America.
Volunteers will use Google Earth to identify and map existing roads in areas of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Volunteers are needed who have access to Google Earth and are comfortable working on computers.
In addition, field volunteers are needed in South America to visit these areas on the ground and confirm the accuracy of the maps. Some of the more specialized tasks that field volunteers will perform include the use of global positioning system (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) equipment, as well as recording photographs and notes about the areas visited.
The wildlands of South America present one of the most important reservoirs of biodiversity on the planet. Mapping South American Wildlands is an ambitious project of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, with Latin American conservation partners, to map all the wildlands in South America, to evaluate their contribution to global biodiversity, and to share and disseminate this information.
This project will first focus on mapping and analyzing the roadless/undeveloped areas in the southern cone countries (Chile and Argentina) using a procedure that the Pacific Biodiversity Institute developed to map the wildlands of the United States in 2001.