What gets mapped gets protected: 85 million hectares now visible on LandMark

Ahead of UNCCD COP17, 85 million hectares of pastoralist community lands in Mongolia have been added to LandMark —the world’s only open, global platform dedicated to mapping Indigenous Peoples’ and community lands.

The new dataset represents 296 community-based organizations and 1,571 pasture user groups, making one of the world’s largest pastoral landscapes more visible than ever before.

LandMark, co-hosted by the World Resources Institute and the International Land Coalition, is built on a simple idea: when community lands are visible, they are better positioned to be recognised in the decisions that shape their future. Mongolia is a powerful demonstration of that principle in action.

For generations, Mongolia’s pastoralists have stewarded vast rangelands that store carbon, sustain biodiversity, restore degraded land, and support livelihoods across the country. Yet, the communities managing these landscapes have often remained underrepresented in global spatial data.

By bringing these territories onto LandMark, their stewardship becomes more visible in the global conversations on land rights, biodiversity, climate resilience, and sustainable land governance. This milestone was made possible through the generosity of The Nature Conservancy, which shared extensive field data, and the collaboration of the Mongolian Pastoral User Association, which contributed additional data layers.

As global frameworks such as UNCCD and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework increasingly call for tenure-disaggregated data, initiatives like this help ensure that pastoralist communities are visible, recognized, and included.