(Cover photo: Rangers and elders gathered around phones during a CoMapeo training in Wai-hau | Jovi Totorea (IKI)
Conservation ranger groups are adapting CoMapeo to local languages, documenting their territories, and building a community-led monitoring network across Solomon Islands.
Projected on the wall was a GIS map of Malaita, layered with public data on logging concessions.
Much of the island was covered.
In the room, rangers and elders were working through the words that would let them map what those concessions cannot see: taboo sites, medicinal plants, grave sites, rivers, wildlife, old paths, and the signs of damage appearing on the land.
"This is what conservation is hungry for," said Robinson Kokope, Chairman of ‘Aru’Aru Conservation. "Mapping."
The Solomon Islands are often made to look small from far away. It is an archipelago of hundreds of islands, many languages, and living relationships between people, land, sea, and ancestry. Most land remains under customary tenure. During my visit with Awana Digital, I heard the same idea repeated again and again - one that Indigenous communities have shared with us across the world:
Land is not property. People are not its owners, but its caretakers.
That responsibility shapes what the rangers map, protect, and keep private.
When logging roads, mining interests, and extractive concessions move across the map, they threaten more than forests. They weaken the systems through which communities care for land, pass knowledge forward, and govern their future.
For two weeks in April, I joined the mapping and monitoring team at Islands Knowledge Institute (IKI) to support CoMapeo trainings with Conservation Ranger Groups. The work builds on Awana Digital’s relationship with Mai-Maasina Green Belt (MMGB), which began in 2022, and is now expanding into a national monitoring effort.
During this visit, I worked alongside IKI, Conservation Metrics (CMI) - the team behind Guardian Connector and its Remoto deployment in Solomon Islands - and partners supported by Nia Tero. My focus was on CoMapeo training, customization, and field support.
Over the course of April and early May, I joined IKI for trainings in Guadalcanal and Malaita before watching them carry the work forward independently in Western Province.
The first training took place on Guadalcanal, one of the Solomon Islands' largest islands, at Parangiju Mountain Lodge, where eight rangers from the Itina and Soli Conservation Ranger Groups gathered. The second took place at the MMGB office in Wai-hau on Malaita Island, with ten rangers from the Po’otori, Nasi, Arahau, Anoniko'a, and 'Aru'Aru Conservation Ranger Groups. IKI then carried the training west to Kolombangara Island, leading a third session at Lineana Retreat Ecolodge with KIBCA rangers from Epaqa, Kiuwai, and Igoana.
In June, IKI returned to Western Province for a fourth training, now leading the work on its own.
IKI also equipped the ranger groups with phones, power banks, and GPS devices. But as the participants shared during the trainings, a tool only becomes useful when people can carry it into the field. Practicing with these tools is a critical part of the expansion of the monitoring program.
Learning in practice
Rangers created observations, added descriptions, photos, and audio, and used tracks to document patrol routes. They worked with background maps and layers, shared records between nearby phones without the internet, and followed how their field data could move into Remoto for analysis and reporting.
To someone already used to smartphones, this may sound simple. In the field, each of these actions changes what a ranger can record and share.
A photo can document a new logging road; a track can show where a patrol went; an audio note can preserve what is hard to type. The right word for a category can make the difference between a tool that feels foreign and one that belongs.
Before the training, Willie Haukari’a, Chairman of Arahau Conservation, had barely used a smartphone. Two days later, he said he could take it on patrol to record what he found and help preserve his own knowledge.
Translating the map
Much of the training went into customizing CoMapeo’s categories.
If the categories are wrong, the map is wrong. If the language is wrong, the tool makes little sense for the people using it.
For the Guadalcanal groups, categories were translated into two local languages. In Malaita, elders helped refine the ‘Are’are words, turning the category list into a conversation about what exists on the land, what should remain private, and how knowledge should be named. In Western Province, KIBCA rangers continued the work in the Duke language.
The rangers map logging and mining, but also ancestral sites, taboo places, medicinal plants, wildlife, and biodiversity.
Not everything belongs on a public map.
No one in the room needed data sovereignty explained. Sacred sites, graves, genealogy, and legal evidence can all become dangerous if exposed without community control. The rangers immediately understood why CoMapeo’s model keeps decisions about data in the hands of the people it belongs to.
A good mapping system must allow restriction and silence as well as visibility.
From field records to action
CoMapeo is where rangers record what they find. Remoto connects those records with satellite alerts, analysis, dashboards, and reports, helping turn field observations into action.
Imazon satellite alerts can point to forest change or a new road. Rangers use CoMapeo to verify it on the ground, recording observations, photos, audio, and tracks. In villages without the internet, they can share those records directly between phones. When someone later reaches a connection, the shared data can move to the Remoto archive.
In the Kira protected area, satellite analysis detected logging. Rangers patrolled the site and photographed damage from logging roads inside the protected area. Their evidence became part of a report to the Solomon Islands Ministry of Environment, which took action to stop the logging.
Alert, patrol, evidence, report, action.
Satellite alerts can show that something changed, but not what it means to the people who live there. Field observations carry that meaning, but only if they can move beyond one phone.
For Charles Afu, the Nasi Conservation Chairman, the training fills a gap communities cannot wait for the government to solve.
"Our government cannot provide the specialists we need," he said. "Young people need to map where their ancestors are and the boundaries of their customary lands. Skilled surveillance is expensive, so this is a unique opportunity."
Genealogy, stories, and memory
After the IKI team returned to the capital, I stayed in Wai-hau at MMGB’s request to support Terrastories, which links stories to places, and Āhau, which supports genealogy and cultural records.
When the team began working with genealogy trees, Chief Mike Haikau Huni Ha’aro spent a morning explaining parts of ‘Are‘are cosmology and worldview. Some of this knowledge is passed only through specific chiefs. Being trusted with even a small part of it was a privilege.
The session made the design problem concrete: software designed to hold genealogy cannot be a generic database. It has to reflect the relationships and responsibilities of the people using it.
Territory is not only an area on a map. Defending it also means protecting the stories, names, and relationships that give it meaning.
Video: Chief Mike Haikau Huni Ha’aro speaking
Working for those who come next
By the time IKI led the third training in Kolombangara without Awana Digital present, it was clear that something important had shifted. KIBCA rangers tracked to a small waterfall that supplies three nearby communities, collected field data, shared it between phones, and adapted their categories into the Duke language.
For me, this kind of handoff is exactly what success looks like. CoMapeo should never arrive as a finished map of someone else's world; it should become something partners can reshape, adapt, and eventually teach themselves.
Watching that happen, I realized that what began with Mai-Maasina Green Belt in Malaita is now becoming part of a national monitoring effort led by IKI and its partners.
The two Western Province trainings reminded me that our goal was never simply to teach an application. It was to support partners so they could confidently lead future trainings themselves.
Tom, from Po’otori Conservation, explained their long-term vision:
"You don’t work for now. You work for the future, 30, 50 years from now."