Prospects and perils in the geospatial turn of conservation

Conservation has embraced advances in big data and related digital technologies as key to preventing biodiversity loss, especially in the identification of areas of conservation priority based on spatial data, which we call the big geospatial data turn. This turn has led to the proliferation of useful methods and tools, including global geospatial maps. But these methods may also undermine moves toward rights-based and inclusive conservation approaches that consider plural values and perspectives. We built on the burgeoning literature to call for greater attention to be paid to the datasets, methodological choices, and the assumptions global mapping for biodiversity conservation is based on. In increasingly prioritizing the use of big geospatial data, conservation professionals risk forgetting that maps show only partial information and limit the diversity of ways of seeing and representing the world. Big geospatial data collected through remotely sensed technologies must still be situated in time and place and provided with appropriate political-economic and sociocultural contexts. Further, global mapping efforts remain primarily the purview of Global North researchers, even given the push to make data open access. Instead of uncritically calling for more data, we urge conservationists to contextualize and situate big geospatial data carefully so as to build a field that achieves socially just and ecologically effective conservation outcomes.