Presentation short abstract

Public university infrastructures democratize spatial data access through hybrid models. CIMSUR’s Planet catalog and community drones exemplify how institutional licenses and open platforms can reshape conservation power relations amid growing criminal appropriation of aerial technologies.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines two complementary initiatives from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) exploring how public universities can transform conservation power relations through hybrid institutional-open infrastructures for environmental data. First, the Planet Satellite Image Catalog developed by UIFS-CIMSUR-UNAM democratizes access to high-resolution Earth observation imagery covering Chiapas, Central America, and the Caribbean. Through UNAM's Campus license, the catalog serves university members, external students with institutional advisors, and collaborators with co-authors, offering PlanetScope (3m) and SkySat (50cm) imagery via interactive dashboards requiring no GIS expertise. Complementing institutional access, UIFS develops open-access visualizations through Planet Stories (Creative Commons licenses), enabling community-based actors to analyze environmental transformations without technical or institutional barriers, illustrating how universities can broker access to commercial spatial data for grassroots governance. Second, community drone experiences reveal critical challenges as organized crime appropriates these technologies across Latin America. Through teaching in Chiapas (2023-2025) and the Latin American Network for Community Use of Drones (Red LatinDron), I document how regulatory frameworks and criminal surveillance transform drones from curiosity tools into control symbols, requiring new pedagogical approaches for contested territories. Both cases illustrate Pritchard et al.'s (2022) environmental data justice framework—data composition, control, access, processing, use, consequences—and Bennett et al.'s (2022) critical remote-sensing practices—exposing injustices, engaging situated knowledges, empowering marginalized actors. The presentation explores public university infrastructures' potential to challenge conservation power dynamics through hybrid models balancing institutional commitments with open dissemination, while highlighting urgent needs to strengthen these capacities against emerging threats to legitimate community environmental monitoring.