For as long as we’ve lived on the land, we’ve mapped it
Early maps weren’t two-dimensional drawings, but living stories etched into memory and passed from generation to generation around the fire. What we now recognise as maps, flat, gridded and data-heavy, are just one way of understanding land. For many Indigenous cultures, mapping was relational, not just spatial.
Among the Martu people of Australia, for example, the landscape is mapped through songlines. Each song encodes layers of knowledge: not just geography, but water sources, seasonal plant life, sacred sites, and social obligations. These are living maps used to navigate, but also to sustain a worldview where land and people are inseparable. A single songline can span hundreds of kilometres, showing how distant points in a landscape are connected through shared ecological and cultural threads.
These maps tell stories of connection. Their purpose wasn’t to divide land but to tell the story of human-land relationships and the interconnectedness of elements within a landscape.
Repairing the damage of disconnected thinking
During colonial times, maps became a means to control. Drawn in distant offices with little regard for the people or ecosystems they divided, these maps carved up territories along arbitrary lines. Mapping in colonial times disconnected people from place, severing the relational knowledge that had long guided how land was cared for, shared, and understood.
This disconnection didn’t just disrupt social and cultural systems, it also laid the groundwork for ecological breakdown. When landscapes are managed in fragments, the systems that sustain them begin to unravel. And today, we are living with the consequences: land degradation on a global scale, biodiversity loss, broken water cycles, and communities cut off from the very ecosystems they once helped to care for.
Now, as we face the urgent task of restoring 40% of the world’s degraded land, it’s clear that the same fragmented thinking won’t fix what it helped to break. This isn’t a challenge that can be met with isolated interventions, planting trees here, reviving a field there. To restore land at scale means restoring entire systems. It means seeing landscapes as wholes, where forests, farms, rivers, economies, and communities are all interconnected.
To do this, mapping must once again become a story of connection, not a tool of division, but a shared lens through which we can understand where we are, what has been lost, and what we can restore, together.
How maps can restore and restory the land
Geographic Information Systems (GIS), once the domain of surveyors and scientists, are being used to reveal something deeper than topography. When used with care and intention, GIS tools can explain the relationships between disparate elements in a landscape that may not seem to interact, but do.
In the context of landscape restoration, GIS can bring a landscape to life making visible the relationships, changes, and stories that shape it. “A map is a visual narrative, an data supported interpretation of the world as observed and experienced on the ground,” says Tom Davies, a Commonland environmental scientist supporting the GIS training with partners in India. “As GIS practitioners, we have a responsibility to ensure that the maps we create truthfully reflect the lived realities on the ground, incorporating relevant public data, local knowledge, and the voices of those who inhabit the landscapes we represent.”
This ethos is driving a year-long GIS training programme led by Commonland and local partners in India. It’s part of a broader commitment to holistic landscape restoration, an approach that recognises that regenerating land at scale means regenerating nature, communities, and economies together.
At the heart of this work is the Three-Zone Approach, which divides a landscape into natural zones (for ecological restoration and protection), combined zones (where communities live and interact with nature), and economic zones (where regenerative livelihoods can flourish). Mapping these zones isn’t just a technical task, it’s a tool to see the bigger picture, to understand how different parts of the landscape interact, and to plan restoration in a way that’s both inclusive and practical.
The training brings together people who rarely sit at the same table, NGO staff, forest officials, and university researchers. What unites them is a shared landscape and a shared desire to understand it more deeply, so they can restore it more effectively.
Take the example of a Forest Department officer from central India. His role had long focused on protecting the forest. He saw how pressures from outside the forest, such as soil erosion in nearby farmland or overgrazing in shared commons, were directly impacting the health of the forest itself. Understanding that the communities surrounding the forest have a long history and deep rooted connection with the forest, he saw the need to explore more holistic solutions. He connected with Commonland to develop a Three-Zone map and landscape vision for his block with a focus of conservation in the Natural zone and ecotourism or sustainable agriculture in the combined zone to lessen the pressure on the forest while still providing community benefits.
This shift in perspective was so profound that he arranged for several colleagues to join the training. He requested Three-Zone maps for the region, recognising that restoration would only be possible if efforts were coordinated across ecological, social, and economic dimensions.
Seeing where we are. Imagining where we are going.
Through GIS, restoration teams are creating maps that offer more than just a snapshot of place, they tell the story of the whole system. These maps help visualise how a change in one part of the landscape, like shifting to regenerative agriculture, can ripple outward, affecting water access, migration patterns, soil health, and biodiversity.
But these are more than technical tools. They are shared stories, grounded in data, shaped by dialogue, and used to build common understanding. They help people listen to one another, plan across sectors, and align their efforts with a broader, long-term vision.
In this way, a map becomes not just a record of where we are, but a way of thinking that helps us agree on where we’re going and how to get there, together.
Written by: Claire Patterson