Contribute

1. Help open the data

The map has empty patches because the underlying public datasets do. Two examples: large parts of central Asia have no recent ambient-air monitor inside the OpenAQ network, so the air map shows them grey. Several countries publish bee-occurrence records into national systems but not into GBIF, so wild-bee density looks artificially zero. The single most leverage citizen action is to push the data into the light.

• Petition your government for open data. The Open Data Charter tracks signatories; the Open Government Partnership is the standard advocacy lane. Write to your national statistical office, environment ministry, or open-data portal asking that the specific dataset relevant to a topic page be published in machine-readable form under an open license.
• Sign the FAIR principles for government data. Findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable. Forward to any official you have channels to.
• Support data-rescue civic groups. SAA, EDGI, Data Refuge, and the Engine Room are the long-standing organisations that protect at-risk environmental data and train civic groups in open-data advocacy.

2. Generate observations yourself

The richest open biodiversity, air, and water datasets are crowd-sourced. They become more useful with every observation, even an amateur one.

• Pollinators & biodiversity — iNaturalist (research-grade observations flow into GBIF, which feeds the bees map), GBIF directly for researchers, eBird for birds, BeeWalk in the UK, Bumble Bee Watch in North America.
• Air quality — Sensor.Community hosts >20,000 citizen-owned low-cost PM monitors whose readings stream into OpenAQ and feed the air map. Sensors cost about US$40 to build.
• Water — EarthEcho Water Challenge teaches do-it-yourself water testing; Water Currents aggregates community-monitoring kits.
• Forest cover & deforestation alerts — Global Forest Watch accepts ground-truth observations that improve their satellite-loss models.
• Wildfire incident reports — the GDACS ecosystem accepts verified field reports; your local fire agency typically has its own intake.

3. Lobby for stronger data law

This is slower than direct observation but has the highest long-run leverage. The countries with the best public data on water, air, biodiversity, and food security are countries where civil society pushed for it.

Or browse the index below

The country list above is the live widget; the static index below is the same set, grouped editorially and kept browsable for visitors without JavaScript.

• Right-to-Know / Freedom-of-Information requests. Use MuckRock (US/global) or your country’s equivalent to request the specific dataset you wish were on the map. Public requests are themselves public — they create pressure even when refused.
• Comment on regulatory data rules. When your environment ministry, EPA, or equivalent opens a docket on what to measure and publish, citizen comments are part of the record. The Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program tracks active US dockets; in the EU, watch EEA consultations.
• Local council and city open-data programmes. Cities move faster than nations. Many publish dashboards now; many do not. A single councillor email asking for a topic-specific data feed often works.

Where to write — vetted official contact points

The pages below are official agency contact surfaces for environmental and statistical open data. None of them are personal email addresses. Use them to ask, by name, for the specific dataset the map page told you was empty.

• United States — EPA contact, USGS contact, data.gov.
• European Union — European Environment Agency, European Commission contact, data.europa.eu helpdesk.
• United Kingdom — Defra / Environment Agency, data.gov.uk feedback.
• Canada — Environment and Climate Change Canada, Open Government Portal.
• Australia — Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, data.gov.au.
• New Zealand — Ministry for the Environment, data.govt.nz.
• India — Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, data.gov.in.
• Brazil — Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, dados.gov.br.
• Kenya — Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry, Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
• Don’t see your country? Email submissions@actsmall.org with a link to the official contact page for your environment ministry, statistical office, or open-data portal. We’ll add it.

We will not maintain a list of personal email addresses. Public-channel agency contact is what makes a request itself a public record.

4. Suggest a catalog entry

Every recommendation on every map page is curated editorially. The catalogs live in plain JSON in a maintainer source tree (not public). If you know your region better than we do, the path in is the web form: Submit an action →. If you find a broken or out-of-date recommendation, email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and the bad link.

Every submission is reviewed manually by a maintainer. Most submissions don’t make it onto the live site; we are not building a moderation team. Be patient.

The full audit log of every external link our daily curator checks lives at <topic>.actsmall.org/live/curator.json — for example, water, bees. Public so anyone can challenge it.

5. Tell two people

The lowest-cost action with the highest reach. Most civic websites die from no one knowing they exist. If a page on any of the topic maps was useful to you, share its URL with two specific people who might also act on it. Every map page has a tell-two-people share affordance in the recommender card — or just copy the URL into a message app.

That’s how the project grows. There is no advertising budget. There is no growth team. There is a recipe and seven URLs.

What we will never ask you for

• Money.
• An email address.
• An account.
• Your phone number.
• A newsletter signup.
• To “join our community”.

If any of those ever appear on an ActSmall site, something has gone wrong — please report it to submissions@actsmall.org.