Archives: Highlights
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The Hidden Lives of Jaguars
Conservationists worldwide use camera traps to study the movements of wild animals. In Belize, they’ve deployed one of the longest-running grids of cameras on the planet to track the hidden lives of jaguars and to focus protections in the dwindling rainforest.
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Jaguars Walk a Dangerous Path
Jaguars are top predators that need large spaces in which to live and hunt. In Belize, 35% of the land has been protected—but these areas are divided into two large clusters, connected by a crucial and dangerous bottleneck that the cats must navigate to survive.
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Bridging Brazil’s Treetops
The Brazilian treetops are full of creatures like monkeys and sloths living high above a forest floor segmented by dangerous roadways. The Via Fauna team is installing arboreal crossings made of cheap, local materials to reconnect the forest canopy — and allow these creatures to once again move freely throughout their landscape.
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The Wonder of Wildlife Crossings
Brazil has more biodiversity than any other nation on Earth, but it also has more than a million miles of roads. Biologist Fernanda Alba and her team are establishing underpasses across the country that allow big terrestrial animals — to date, the team has documented over 40,000 safe wildlife crossings.
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Trees from Above!
In order to scale up reforestation, Mauricio Ruiz and his organization ITPA have partnered with the drone fleet at MORFO. Each drone can plant up to 50 hectares of forest per day, which is 50 times faster than planting by hand.
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Meet Mauricio Ruiz
Mauricio Ruiz grew up in the Atlantic Forest—one of the most biodiverse and threatened on Earth. At just 14 years old, he founded ITPA to fight back against rampant deforestation.
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Saving Golden Lion Tamarins from Yellow Fever
Golden lion tamarins live only in small fragments of the Atlantic Forest. In 2021, an outbreak of yellow fever took nearly one third of the already endangered population, but teams were able to modify a vaccine for humans to help immunize the population against future outbreaks.
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A Historic Recovery for Golden Lion Tamarins
Golden lion tamarins were nearly wiped out in the 1970s, but worldwide efforts by 150 zoos helped bring the species back from near-extinction. Today, local conservationists are expanding the forests in Brazil, and the wild population has grown from under 200 to now over 4800 tamarins!
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Searching for “Lost Frogs”
Deep in the Panamanian forest, researchers are looking for “lost frogs” — species believed to have gone extinct, but that may be holding on in the wild.
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What is the Frog Ark?
In the heart of Panama, scientists have created an artificial rainforest to protect endangered frogs from the worst wildlife disease ever recorded.
