By Richard Munday,

One of our ongoing projects for the last six months has been the GPS mapping of the entire reserve.

This project has been planned in three stages. Stage 1 was the complete mapping and marking of all the trails around the reserve, which meant walking around all the trails and stopping every 50M waiting for a GPS signal and then moving on to take the next point. Now as you can imagine, with about 30 KM of trails to mark we knew it would take a long time! But thankfully we had the help of Rike Becker, a student who is now in Argentina, who took charge of the entire project and managed to complete this stage for us.

Stage 2 was the marking of all the main structures of the reserve, platforms, buildings, bridges and then putting all the data into one spreadsheet so that we could make the computerized version of the map. Again this wasn’t a huge task, although we probably had about 1000 points in total and probably a lot more than that. We managed to have the basic map made up with about two weeks of work, the next stage of things was to link all the points together so that the trails were actually lines and not just dots, making sure each trail was coloured differently, adding special colour points for bridges, platforms and buildings and then adding trail names, the river, the creek, a compass, and the main key.

What a cool map!

Stage 3 which is still being planned out, is the identification and marking of key areas of botanical interest. In February we should have had several botanists planning to visit us, but due to the flood and the resulting high swamp levels, we decided it would be best to delay their arrival until we could use the forest properly. When the levels have dropped again, the botanists will be able to help us identify primary and secondary forest, swamp areas, dense forest, clear forest, even down to different types of trees, this again is going to be a pretty big task and will no doubt take a good few months to complete it. But once the work is done we will have a complete map, which we can use for many different things like navigation, identification of good sites for certain projects such as mist-netting and auto-camera sites, and even new observation points.

You can learn more about our other projects on our Conservation Program in Peru here