Mapeo was built with and for earth defenders to easily document environmental and human rights information and to collect data about their land. It can be used by individuals or by teams who want to collaborate and share information, and is particularly good at working in offline and remote environments. It is simple to use, free and accessible, and can be customized with local languages and settings .There is a Mapeo Mobile app, used to gather evidence in the field, to take photographs or record GPS points of significant places; and there is a Mapeo Desktop app, used to organize data collected on mobile or GPS, and to visualize, edit and create reports on which action can be taken which would be hard to do on a mobile. Both tools can work for individual or team projects as you can synchronize data between mobile devices, and from mobile to computer.
Mapeo was co-designed and developed with Indigenous communities who face threats to their land such as illegal gold mining, oil contamination and poaching and who want to document these activities in order to take community action against them, to report them to authorities, file lawsuits, launch media campaigns, or create maps for land claims.