
MapHubs Feronia: the first public plantation-level monitoring system in Africa
Feronia's Lokutu Concession, Orientale Province (map link) A long and winding road to collaboration View from Boteka Plantation owned by Feronia PHC Mapping oil palm plantations began with a twenty hour detour through the rainforest. In May 2014, I was with our Moabi field team, testing smartphone mapping tools with a local indigenous peoples' organization in Equateur Province, DRC. As we were about to set off from the provincial capital of Mbandaka, we agreed to give a loca

Can maps stop a bulldozer?
How MapHubs helped stop a palm oil company clearing a Manhattan-sized chunk of rainforest in Papua, Indonesia. In 1997, I was desperate to go to Papua. The island was still smothered in a tangle of dense rainforest punctured by giant mountains crowned with equatorial glaciers. Navigating its poorly charted rivers would've taken weeks but offered the chance to encounter tribes hermetically sealed from modernity by miles of swamp forest and ravenous malarial mosquitoes. Me in K