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Global is Local
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The interactive cartography application was developed by a British company, Helveta. The system is housed in a rugged, handheld PDA, which is employed by GreenWood foresters and community sawyers to gather remote field data, such as the GPS coordinates and dimensions of a "parent" tree and the lumber produced from its harvest. Bigleaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) is the most desirable timber species in tropical America, and its uncontrolled and illegal extraction are the focus of intense environmental concern and international scrutiny.
GreenWood's GPS bar-coding pilot project is sponsored by a grant from the U.S. Forest Service International Programs, and it lays the foundation for enhanced control of these precious natural assets. According to the former USFS program coordinator, Dana Roth, "Our goal is to improve transparency in the Honduran forestry sector. By connecting communities to consumers, we also hope to foster a shared commitment for conservation and sustainable forest management—all along the value chain."
The project puts the forest at the fingertips of guitar aficionados as never before. Guitar owners can conduct a "virtual" tour of the rainforest community that produced the wood in their instrument. Arriving at the harvest site of their tree via Google Earth™, online tourists can download all the technical information they like, as well as photos and profiles of the local loggers who cut the wood, their families and the surrounding flora and fauna, plus music and videos of the harvest process.
Drawing a direct link between the forest and the finished guitar, this groundbreaking technology makes the global truly local!