by Monserratte Vásquez
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Twenty community members from the Valle de Los Manduriacos, who are training to be forest rangers, participated in the territory and participatory mapping workshop held in March. The workshop consisted of two phases: the first focused on political mapping, led by José Cueva, a member of the CIPBAT team, and the second on social mapping and the use of geographic tools, led by the ALDEA team.
The workshop focused on building governance and territorial management skills among future forest rangers. To this end, participants designed maps of their communities, illustrating their relationship with the Los Cedros Protected Forest (BPLC), and then identified threats and vulnerabilities to the BPLC from each community’s perspective. They also worked on identifying map characteristics and symbols.
The course covered the use of free applications such as: Notecam Lite, Google Maps Pro, Comaps for georeferencing, Kobo Collect and Kobo Toolbox for data collection.
This course benefited from the significant participation of a delegation from communities surrounding the Cambugan Protected Forest in the neighboring canton of Otavalo, who have also been working on technical training processes for the defense of their territory. Thanks to their visit, we had a very enriching exchange of experiences between communities in the upper and lower reaches of the Guayllabamba River basin, where similar threats are shared and different strategies for conflict containment and resolution are employed.
The course concluded with the formation of two practice groups within the ranger training team. One group was tasked with collecting information on the form titled “Tourism Potential in the Communities Surrounding the BPLC,” while the other group completed the form titled “Camera Traps in the BPLC,” using the Kobo Collect tool. With the collected data, the ALDEA technical team created a historical map that illustrates the work carried out by the rangers and explains the commitment of the Los Cedros Scientific Station to the conservation and research of the BPLC’s biodiversity, as well as the tourism proposals of the surrounding communities.
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