Part 3—Examine Maps and Present your Findings

Look at a country for which you have a report on a wetland site. From your Part 1 search, you know that these countries are on the continent of Africa, but do you know which part? Buttons in the RAMSAR Site Map column offer a way to examine a map of each site.

1. Click the RAMSAR Site Map button for one of the individual sites. This will open a new window showing the wetland in an online Geographical Information System (GIS). The wetland site will be marked with a yellow dot on the map.
2. Along the top of the window, you'll see menus and buttons for Navigation and Tools. Click the zoom in tool (the magnifying glass with a plus sign) then drag a box over the region that includes the yellow dot. This will give you a zoomed-in view of the wetland site.
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• Click the zoom-in tool (the magnifying glass with a plus sign) once to select it.
• Place your cursor over the map, in the ocean, northwest of the yellow dot.
• Press your mouse button down and drag diagonally to the southeast.
• Release the mouse when the box covers an area surrounding the yellow dot. The time for the new map to display will vary from a few seconds to a few minutes.


Similarly, you can use the magnifying glass tool with a minus sign to zoom out to see part or all of the continent of Africa, keeping in mind where Mauritania is.
3. Use the GIS Layers and Tools to examine the features in the region surrounding the site. You can click the Help button (the question mark icon) to show information on how to use the tools and capabilities of the Map Viewer, or you can simply experiment with the GIS tools to see how they affect the map.

Learn more about the wetland sites you chose by entering the site name or the name of a nearby citiy as a search term in an Internet search engine such as Google???. If a site supports tourism, you may also be able to find information about it in a travel guidebook.