Alison DeGraff Ollivierre

Alison DeGraff Ollivierre is an award-winning cartographer and certified GIS professional (GISP) with 10+ years of experience and training, recognized as one of Geospatial World’s 50 Rising Stars of 2021 and xyHt Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Remarkable Geospatial Professionals of 2018. Aly currently works full-time as a Cartographer at National Geographic Maps, part-time conducting freelance work as Tombolo Maps & Design, and part-time as BirdsCaribbean’s Senior Cartographer, Caribbean Birding Trail Project Coordinator, and Operations Officer. She has consulted as an Associate with EPIC since 2015, primarily assisting with the Protecting Seabirds in the Transboundary Grenadines project. Aly has been involved in bird conservation work in the Caribbean for almost a decade, including co-authoring a collaborative avian field guide for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada with Juliana Coffey entitled Birds of the Transboundary Grenadines. Her earlier work in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada included assisting The Nature Conservancy and the Sustainable Grenadines, Inc. with a collaborative marine multi-use zoning plan to increase capacity to protect, manage, and sustainably use the resources of the Grenada Bank and facilitating a transboundary participatory mapping project to develop a comprehensive local knowledge GIS database of important heritage sites for use in the countries’ application for designation as a mixed marine transboundary UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Aly holds a Master of Science degree from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad) in Geoinformatics and a BA degree from Middlebury College (Vermont, USA) in Geography. She wrote her MSc thesis on participatory mapping in Caribbean small island developing states and how it can be utilized to address climate change, and she earned a certificate from the GIslands (GIS + Islands) Advanced International School on the use and development of geotechnologies for the support and facilitation of planning and management for climate change adaptation in coastal and island environments. Aly is highly skilled in the collection and visual representation of geospatial data and local knowledge, as well as in community outreach strategies, and her maps can be found in museums, atlases, books, reports, articles, and as stand-alone products across the globe. She has been researching and facilitating participatory mapping projects since 2010 and co-founded and served as a Director-at-Large for the International Society for Participatory Mapping (ISPM) since 2018.