Mapping Africa’s parks
Here’s a worthy project – the MAPA Project. It intends mapping more than a thousand of Africa’s protected areas on Google Earth in the interests of biodiversity conservation. The first Google Earth layer has just appeared and can be downloaded from the Google Earth Outreach Showcase. MAPA is driven by March Turnbull, an environmental journalist, and Stellenbosch-based company, Tracks4Africa.
It is interesting to reflect that when I was at ecoAfrica.com, another Stellenbosch-based ecotourism company, we launched a Google Earth layer for the Kruger National Park (2MB .kmz file; requires Google Earth) in early 2008, in the context of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. All the information was gleaned from publicly available sources. I am still very proud of that layer (I hope the guys are still maintaining it) and I am excited to see that MAPA is making what was then a vague vision of ours too, happen.
Our layer included:
- Lodges, camps, restcamps and trails camps
- Transport: roads, distances, routes, gates, airstrips
- Ecology: rainfall, biomes, wildlife census – all graphically represented
- History: how Kruger evolved and its borders expanded since 1884
- National park, transfrontier park and game reserve boundaries
Travel layer: lodge and camp locations
Travel layer: game lodge information
Ecological layer: animal census
Ecological layer: biomes
Transport layer: roads, gates , airstrips, routes, distances
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