The Amazon Conservation Team, as an organization, really tries to highlight community voices. The communities are the protagonists.
Brian Hettler, Director of Mapping for the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), recognized early on the potential of using ArcGIS StoryMaps to communicate his organization’s work—and has since produced several award-winning stories that keep our storytelling community in awe, both in design and purpose.
The latest, a finalist in the 2025 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition, features the territorial areas of isolated Indigenous peoples in South America. Created in collaboration with the International Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact (GTI-PIACI), A Fight for Survival combines maps, images, and text to show where isolated peoples live, the growing threats they face, and strategies for their protection.
Join the ArcGIS Storytelling team in conversation with Brian Hettler as he shares his approach to community-centered mapping.
Brian, for readers new to your work and ACT, can you provide a little background?
Sure.
ACT partners with Indigenous and other local communities to protect tropical forests and strengthen traditional culture.
For about 15 years now, I’ve led the organization’s participatory mapping initiatives across South America. The mapping team and I work closely with Indigenous communities to create cultural maps that record and preserve traditional knowledge and support conservation efforts unique to each community and ecosystem.
My first experiences with “storytelling with maps” really started with this participatory mapping work.
Maps are a facilitation tool, a conversation with local communities. Through maps, they tell their stories.
How does that approach apply to your latest story, A Fight for Survival?
Over the past few years, we’ve worked closely with GTI-PIACI—an international working group of 21 Indigenous organizations and non-government organizations from Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. These organizations support the recognition and protection of Isolated peoples and public policies that promote ‘No Contact’ protection strategies.
Mapping plays a critical role in this work.
Together, combining local knowledge with satellite imagery, we compiled the first complete maps of isolated Indigenous peoples across South America. The resulting maps show how isolated Indigenous peoples’ territories encompass some of the best-conserved ecosystems in the region and how development threats are encroaching on those areas.
ACT and GTI-PIACI hope that, after exploring the story, readers will realize that protecting isolated Indigenous peoples is a critical human rights issue that also has far-reaching environmental consequences.
As a competition finalist, the story includes content from Esri’s ArcGIS Living Atlas. Can you tell us about your data and map choices?
The forests where isolated Indigenous peoples live are often very remote with few biological studies about their importance for preserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. To better understand the environmental importance of isolated people’s territories without putting communities at risk of contact, the story draws on global and regional datasets derived from satellite imagery, including data layers available through Living Atlas. These regional layers, including forest integrity and human modification indices, provided consistent insight into isolated Indigenous territories across South America.
We analyzed Living Atlas and other geospatial layers by overlaying the dataset developed by GTI-PIACI that indicates that territories of isolated Indigenous peoples across South America. When it came to presenting this data in maps, we generalized the visualization of the territories of Isolated Indigenous peoples to maintain confidentiality and avoid someone potentially using these maps to make unwanted contact.
How did ArcGIS StoryMaps help you turn individual maps into a unified story?
ArcGIS StoryMaps helped us tell a unified story about who isolated Indigenous peoples are, the environmental importance of their territories, and the significant threats those areas are facing. The builder’s capacity to integrate photos of isolated Indigenous peoples alongside maps helps to humanize these communities and to show that there is a diversity of isolated Indigenous cultures across South America, instead of just showing points on a map.
We used the sidecar block in ArcGIS StoryMaps to present unified sequences of maps highlighting the environmental conditions in their territories and encroaching threats from extractive development activities to communicate how preserving isolated peoples’ right to self-determination and to remain isolated is an urgent issue that has an impact on us all.
Are there any storytelling tips or best practices that you can share?
Yes, a few things come to mind.
Before we build a story, our team identifies key messages and language. There are sensitivities around some of the topics we discuss, and we always want to communicate respectfully and in an appropriate way.
The close working relationships of our local teams with Indigenous communities and organizations helps ensure we keep communities at the center of the stories.
From a visual standpoint, each story typically opens with eye-catching photographs to hook people right away and to establish the cultural and environmental richness of the places we work.
We establish a visual rhythm of photos followed by maps that provide more in-depth information. A style guide with custom colors and fonts helps us maintain a unified visual narrative across media and maps.
And we consider different interest levels as the story builds where each reader gets a basic idea of the story while others can click links and learn more
Many of your stories, including A Fight for Survival, are told in multiple languages. Can you share the impact of multilingual stories for local communities?
We strive to translate as many of ACT’s stories to local languages as we can because we feel it is important for local people—especially our partner communities and organizations—to be able to access and review the stories we publish. Usually, we do this at the end of the process by translating a mostly finished story with careful consideration for not only languages but also what additional information is relevant for those local audiences. For example, we may include additional details or links to local resources.
The GTI-PIACI story was co-authored by representatives from many of the organizations participating in the coalition to protect isolated Indigenous peoples. We developed the story in English, Spanish, and Portuguese simultaneously so that everyone could read the story and add their contributions.
What’s next for you, ACT, and your partners?
ACT is celebrating 30 years of biocultural conservation this year and will be reflecting on our history and growth over the life of the organization. We’re putting together a story to highlight some milestones in the organization’s history and to visually show on a map what Indigenous and local communities have been able to accomplish.
This year, we also will release a new version of The Amazonian Travels of Richard Evans Schultes, about the famous American mid-20th century ethnobotanist who collaborated with Indigenous communities to document their traditional knowledge about plants. This was one of ACT’s first interactive stories, created in 2016 with the classic Esri Story Maps templates and then updated in 2019. The new version, likely to be issued this summer, will move the content to the current ArcGIS StoryMaps platform with a lot of new improvements.
We’ll also be releasing an English version of a virtual museum exhibit created with ArcGIS StoryMaps in partnership with the Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia. Titled Living Words: Indigenous Perspectives on the Leticia Ethnographic Museum’s Collections (Palabras de Vida: Una investigation participativa de la collection del Museo Etnográfico de Leticia desde las miradas indígenas), the project is the first Indigenous-led research project into the Museum’s collections, representing an important shift in perspective on objects first collected and described by Christian missionaries in the 1960s and 1970s.
Do you have any final advice for other storytellers?
There are a few important things that I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, with ArcGIS StoryMaps projects.
I think it’s helpful to take a combined approach—first outline your story draft for a little structure and then jump into the ArcGIS StoryMaps builder.
Experiment with the blocks. Use text, media, and maps. Move them around and find structures that you can repeat throughout the story. It’s about finding the right combination of structure and flexibility.
I recommend the same approach to maps. Before you invest too deeply in one style or type, try out 2D and 3D maps. Insert static and interactive maps. Check them on different devices. Find out earlier rather than later whether an idea will work.
And finally, if possible, involve a multidisciplinary team. Don’t try to do it all yourself. It’s important to involve other people and provide different perspectives outside of the mapping team — from communications professionals to graphic designers to community coordinators.
This featured storyteller interview was prepared as a part of the April 2026 Issue of StoryScape.
For more interviews and articles like this one, be sure to check out StoryScape, a monthly digital magazine for ArcGIS StoryMaps that explores the world of place-based storytelling.
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