A new review in Conservation Science and Practice, by Michael Kowalski and colleagues, offers a useful stocktake of the field. The authors define participatory mapping as a collaborative process in which participants and cartographers co-develop maps representing local knowledge, experiences and preferences about a place. Their review covers 398 peer-reviewed studies, tracing how the method has been used across conservation science and practice. It also makes clear that a field built around community knowledge still lacks consistent standards for how that knowledge should be gathered, interpreted, protected and used.