Mapping the Amazon, one shared edit at a time

The Amazon basin is one of the least-charted inhabited regions on Earth. Across its forests and floodplains there are towns with no streets on the map, rivers that twist far from where old charts placed them, and roads that appear and vanish with the seasons. Mapazonia exists to help close that gap by guiding people through collaborative mapping in OpenStreetMap, the open, freely licensed map of the world.

The idea is simple and has been around for years: take advantage of openly available satellite imagery and the work of many volunteers to build accurate, current geographic data for a region that commercial map-makers have largely overlooked. Every contributor traces a small piece — a stretch of river, a cluster of houses, a forest track — and together those pieces become a map that researchers, aid groups and local residents can actually use.

What you can help map

How collaborative mapping works

OpenStreetMap is built the way an encyclopedia is built: openly, by many hands, and free for anyone to reuse. Mapping projects in the Amazon often use a tasking workflow, where a large area is divided into a grid of small squares. Volunteers claim one square at a time, trace the features they find in the imagery, and mark it complete so a more experienced mapper can review it. This keeps the work organised, avoids two people editing the same spot, and lets a project of hundreds of square kilometres be finished by dozens of people in an afternoon.

Community mapping events in places like Costa Rica's Sarapiquí river basin and Colombia's La Guajira region have shown how powerful this can be: local students and residents, who know the ground far better than any satellite, sit alongside remote volunteers to map flood-prone neighbourhoods, water reservoirs and roads before the next emergency arrives.

Start where you like