María Soledad Jaime Arteaga is a specialist in Latin American environmental crime enforcement, with deep knowledge of local wildlife and forest protection laws across the region. Her work focuses on illegal logging, deforestation, and supply chain fraud, combining legal frameworks with innovative technologies (e.g., forensic wood identification, satellite monitoring) to strengthen compliance.
Legal & Regional Experience:
• Peru: Served in the Justice Department (Anti-Corruption Branch), designing administrative reforms and KPIs for transparency in natural resource governance.
• Argentina: As USFS Program Manager, trained law enforcement and park rangers on illegal logging prevention, fire management, and invasive species policies.
• Regional Scope: Leads the USFS Illegal Logging Program across Latin America, collaborating with the Foreign Agricultural Service (Colombia), INTERPOL, and Indigenous communities to align local laws with international standards (e.g., Lacey Act, CITES).
• Multilateral Engagement: Advises governments (Ecuador, Brazil) and NGOs on legal tools to combat wildlife trafficking and land-use crimes, informed by fieldwork and policy analysis.

The Critical Minerals Dashboard locates mining projects of critical minerals and Rare Earth Elements (REEs) in Latin America, considering the strategic competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Data is sourced from multiple open-source channels and will be regularly updated and expanded.

Detects land-cover changes resulting from human activities in near real-time, producing updates every 16 days. The computational neural network is ‘trained’ to understand the normal pattern of changes in vegetation greenness in relation to terrain and rainfall for a site and then marks areas as changed where the greenness suddenly changes well beyond these normal limits.