Modes and Access
The Atlas is organized into modes — one for each kind of work you can do. The mode menu in the header switches between them, and the modes you see depend on what your account is allowed to do.
Two modes are open to anyone, with no account. The rest are working tools, opened by request, because territorial data is sensitive and access is scoped to the places a person or institution actually speaks for.
Open to Everyone
No account, no permission, no request.
Explore
Browse every mapped area in the basin with its designation, governance, and contextual layers. See View areas.
Voices (reading)
Read the stories and maps communities have published about their own territories, in the language they were written in. See Read stories and maps.
Opened by Request
The working modes are granted by administrators, or delegated by a country validator within the countries they validate. A grant is scoped: it applies to specific areas, or to a country, rather than to the whole basin.
| Mode | What it does | Capability |
|---|---|---|
| Contribute | Add areas and improve the metadata on the ones already mapped. | edit_metadata, add_areas |
| Assess | Run and store management effectiveness assessments, and build portfolios of areas. | assess_view, portfolio, pame_assess |
| Validate | Review and approve what gets published, for the country you hold authority over. | validate |
| Fund | Declare where your organization funds, and see every other funder's declared footprint. | funder |
| Voices (publishing) | Publish your community's own stories and maps for the territories you represent. | voices |
Why Access Is Scoped
The Atlas is collaborative and, deliberately, not open to all comers. The ability to contribute is tied to the places you can legitimately speak for: validation authority sits with each country, what is published and visible is controlled by the people the data describes, and community stories and maps bypass review entirely, because a community does not ask permission to speak about its own territory.
This follows directly from Data Sovereignty and Control.
On a Phone
Explore, Assess, and Voices work on a phone. Contribute, Validate, and Fund need a desktop or tablet — their layouts (file upload, side-by-side submission diffs, wide grant tables) have no narrow form worth shipping, so they are withheld rather than shown broken. Opening a link to one of those modes on a phone lands you in Explore with a short notice explaining why.
Requesting Access
The voices capability aside, access is requested rather than self-serve. Reading needs nothing at all; to contribute, assess, validate, fund, or publish, ask an administrator or a country validator for the capability you need. See Participation for the ways to take part.