FOUND

Interpreting Nature to Locate Those Who We Are Missing

Using technology to

search.

Over 130,000 persons are reported as disappeared in Mexico. Behind each case there is a family searching for answers. FOUND works at the intersection of frontier technology and the lived knowledge of search groups, driving systemic change and building institutional capacity to improve how governments respond to disappearance.

Explore our journey

Our journey · 2023 – 2027

Our journey, milestone by milestone

From the first experimental site in Guadalajara to platforms now running inside national search commissions — the milestones that brought FOUND here, and what comes next.

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FOUND{Team} · Our core team brings together collectives of families from Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Colombia searching for their missing loved ones, alongside CentroGeo, the University of Oxford, Jalisco's Search Commission, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Universidad de Guadalajara. We work alongside strategic partners including the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General, the Colombian Search Unit (UBPD), Mexico's National Search Commission, LAB-CO, and forensic anthropologist Luis Fondebrider.

FOUND Project team using advanced technology in field search operations

Satellite spectral time-series analysis of search areas

Spectral detection of clandestine sites using satellite imagery

Platforms{core member: CentroGeo} · Spectral indices — Identifying substances linked to disappearances via satellite and drone imagery, and when they were present. · Clandestine sites location — AI that finds what was meant to stay hidden.

Technologies deployed

20+

Institutional partners

Countries

Documentary

Watch the Trailer

The story of families, science, and the search for those who are missing.

FOUND Documentary 2026

Technologies in Action

Multispectral & Hyperspectral Imaging
Airborne LiDAR
Seismic Noise Interferometry (TIRSA)
Electrical Resistivity Tomography, Conductivimetry
Satellite Spectral Analysis
Machine Learning
Forensic Entomology, Botany, Territorial Analysis, Soil Science

Community collaboration in search efforts

Team collaboration during field operations

Aerial view of experimental calibration site

The Role of Buscadoras

Women-led collectives are at the heart of FOUND's work. They have reshaped the national conversation on disappearance and justice. Their search practices, born from lived experience, are vital forensic knowledge. Alongside them, FOUND listens, learns, and incorporates their methods into our technological efforts.

Buscadoras hands with plants symbolising hope and remembrance

Coproduction with search groups

The knowledge was already there.

For years, searching mothers have walked hills, ranches, abandoned houses and countless roads across Mexico. They learned to read the earth with a precision no book or scientist taught them: that disturbed soil looks different, that certain flowers bloom where or when they shouldn't, that vegetation changes colour where the ground holds extra nutrients as a result of the presence of buried bodies. This is, in effect, forensic knowledge; a practice of citizen science. FOUND begins by listening, learning, and building the place where this knowledge can sit at the same table as science, context analysis, and the institutions responsible for the search.

When families speak, they speak in the present tense. "He is a son." "She is a student." The verb stays in present tense. There is an ethic in that grammar — and we have learned it from them, and made it our own.

A principle FOUND adopted from searching families "There is always something" — in the words of the mothers, nature is a witness of what happens.

Coproduction in practice · Tlajomulco

An example of how families codesigned an experimental site

Our experimental sites were not built from institutional data or scientific evidence alone. Families described that when large amounts of soil are moved to install electrical-tower bases, clandestine graves can appear in that disturbed ground. So we built a site beside electrical towers to replicate exactly that condition — and to test how each instrument behaves where the problem actually occurs. The methods adapt to each place; the principle of coproduction with families does not.

Four ways of seeing the territory

FOUND is the integration of four ways of observing the land. The work is to hold the conversation between them — so that, together, they lead to better-equipped and better-informed search.