Recently, I was asked to talk to graduate students about my experience as an environmentalist and conservationist, and about how my love for the environment was born. I grew up in Costa Rica, and as much as I would like to tell a story of growing up running around the rainforest with mischievous monkeys, that’s not the case. I grew up in the city as the second oldest of ten children. In fact, the first time I saw a monkey I was probably in my late teens. Watching Jacques-Yves Cousteau documentaries and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on television as a small child made me fall in love with science and protecting the environment. And while I can converse on Thoreau, Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and many others for whom I have deep admiration, my formative years were shaped by a different set of environmentalists, including Nobel Peace Prize Rigoberta Menchú and Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes.

My land ethic emerged from a view of the land as a provider rather than our playground. When my family outgrew our city home we moved to a more rural area surrounded by coffee fields. When coffee blooms it creates a fragrant carpet of aromatic white flowers—an incredible event lasting only one day. Every time I go home to visit there are fewer coffee fields and more houses and development. (I wish that there was an equivalent program similar to The Conservation Fund’s Strategic Conservation Planning that could help my beautiful home country plan for sustainable cities using the triple bottom line.) Experiences like these shaped my perspective and drove me to become an environmentalist.

Looking out over Backbone Ridge in North Carolina. Photo by Steve Orr.

I started working for The Conservation Fund a few months after earning my Master of Environmental Management with a Certificate in Geospatial Analysis from Duke University. This year I will celebrate my 9th anniversary with the Fund, and during those years computing power has profoundly changed the way we do conservation. In order to create and manage the Fund’s mapping and analysis I work with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), one of the best (but not the only) tools to inform our work. I started using GIS and remote sensing around 1994. Back then we created land use maps by hand and then digitized them into a very crude GIS. It was a slow and tedious process. Two decades later we have accomplished things no one ever thought possible. Even a year ago we made fun of drones taking off as a conservation tool, but today drones are monitoring easements and many companies are using laser equipped drones to make very detailed maps of land use, terrain, buildings and infrastructure.

Today, I oversee the deployment of Geospatial technology across the organization and serve as science lead and solutions provider on specific projects, including web map and story map capabilities on the Fund’s website. Recently I worked with the Fund’s creative director to completely revise our cartographic elements—standardizing all of our maps so they are highly readable, understandable, simple and if I may say, beautiful. In addition to the technical aspects of my job, I have also moved into more direct work with partners, fostering relationships and building capacity for our clients over the past few years.

While I may be a desk-bound landscape ecologist most days, I have been known to leave the office to hike with a 40-pound Google Street View camera on my back to map miles of trails in places the Fund has helped protect. One of my favorite assignments has been working on a partnership with Google’s Street View/Trekker program, and one of my favorite Treks was in company of my colleague Reggie Hall at Chimney Rock State Park in North Carolina. Besides me forgetting to charge the batteries of the Trekker’s brain (aka Android phone), everything else went smoothly and we are both smiling in the picture!

Here I am wearing the Google Trekker backpack with my colleague Reggie Hall at Chimney Rock State Park in western North Carolina. Photo courtesy The Conservation Fund.

Using technology and making “good” maps are not the only rewards of my job. Every time I see a longleaf pine tree across the southern U.S. I feel a deep sense of pride, because one of my first projects at the Fund was mapping places where these important native pines could successfully be restored across the landscape. Using the tools of 21st century mapmaking, the Fund’s team and I helped draft the first maps to show where substantial acres of longleaf pine survive, tracing the outlines of the forest’s historical range. The graphics reveal where the best bets for longleaf expansion may lie. Some amazing champions carried on that initiative, and today we have seen a great deal of work going into restoring this important ecosystem.

When we created this map of significant landscapes for longleaf pine restoration we had very little data but lots of expert knowledge. We used data from the USDA Forest Service, GIS and lots of expert consultation. Thanks to this collaborative process the significant landscapes have been widely used by many organizations.

Besides my 9 years at the Fund working on amazing conservation projects, there is another anniversary I will celebrate this fall. Twenty years ago in September I moved to the U.S. from Costa Rica. People often ask me which country do I consider home? Or do I dream and think in Spanish or English? A while ago I decided that I did not have to choose between the two countries. Just as the ruby-throated hummingbird and many birds of prey, songbirds and waterfowl make both countries their home, I too have chosen to call no one country home. Instead, I like to think of one home, planet Earth, and one family, our global human family. Conservation sees and knows no political boundaries, languages or nationalities. And that is not just a moral judgment I apply to my life, it applies to my work when designing wildlife corridors and delineating core habitat to include the maximum physical extent possible, as well as the Fund’s support of regional and cross-border conservation initiatives.