- In central Belize, the Maya Forest Corridor, a narrow section of forested land, is key for wildlife movements across Belize, conservationists say.
- A land acquisition by the Maya Forest Corridor Trust in 2021 was a major step forward in protecting the corridor.
- Members of the Trust are now working on ways to secure and bolster the ecological integrity of the land, but face threats like roads, fire and even a national sporting event.
“About a week ago we lost a jaguar in a car collision, just over here,” says Celso Poot, director of the nonprofit Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center. He is standing at the side of the George Price Highway in Central Belize. Every few minutes a truck thunders past.
“I came out a couple days later, and there were fresh jaguar tracks here, so we know they are using this to cross this area,” he continues, gesturing to the muddy track leading from a nearby culvert into the surrounding forest.
Though just two lanes, the George Price Highway is one of Belize’s major thoroughfares, linking Belize City and the coast with the tourist hub of San Ignacio in the west and Guatemala. It also bisects the Maya Forest Corridor, a narrow, forested stretch of land that conservationists say is critical for wildlife connectivity across Belize and beyond.
Walking along the muddy track, Poot finds even more evidence supporting that conviction. Alongside the jaguar tracks flecked with fallen leaves, are the three-toed prints of a Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii), a globally endangered species.
“This is new, fresh, … in the past week,” says Poot, bending down to examine the tracks, clearly visible in the slick grey mud.
Poot whips out his cellphone and relays the news to one of the zoo’s wildlife officers. To understand the impact of traffic and noise on wildlife, they’ve set up camera traps paired with acoustic receivers along established trails at distances of 50, 100 and 200 meters (164, 328 and 656 feet) from the road. With luck, one of the cameras will have captured an image of the tapir, and Poot wants to see it downloaded as soon as possible.
“What we’re seeing here are two of the larger mammals in this area using the same trail within the corridor, so this is critical for wildlife movement,” Poot says.
Belize is a small country — 22,966 square kilometers (8,867 square miles) — just half the size of Costa Rica. While over a third of all land in Belize is under protection, none of the protected areas are large enough, on their own, to ensure genetic connectivity for large and wide-ranging species like jaguars and tapirs.
For decades, conservationists have been trying to secure a safe passage for wildlife through private land that stands between major forest blocks in the north and south. That passage, which is 370 km2 (143 mi2) and dubbed the Maya Forest Corridor, connects protected areas in the Maya Mountain Massif in southern Belize with the Selva Maya, a network of protected areas across northern Belize, Guatemala and Mexico and the largest tropical forest in Latin America after the Amazon.
Until recently, only about 40 km2 (15.4 mi2) of the corridor were under private protection. Even as conservation groups mobilized to buy and protect remaining forest patches, the land was being cleared for sugarcane and other largescale agriculture, including cattle. Since the idea was first conceived, forested land in the corridor has shrunk by more than 65%, according to a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
But over the last few years, the nonprofit Maya Forest Corridor Trust has acquired enough land to give wildlife a path. “It’s still a skinny corridor. We’d like to widen it, but we’ve almost fully connected the two big [forest] blocks,” says Elma Kay, chairwoman of the Trust’s board of directors.
The Belize Zoo, one of the Trust’s member organizations, manages the only portion of the corridor with protected forest on both sides of the George Price Highway. Mitigating its impact on wildlife is a top priority, Poot says.
The jaguar killed in March was a female, and the necropsy revealed she was carrying two fetuses. “That’s a big loss,” Poot says. There are only 800-1,000 jaguars in Belize. Poot says he’s also seen tapir, puma (Puma concolor), and numerous other animals killed on this and other highways in Belize.
And it’s not just outright mortalities that are the problem. The highway also interrupts gene flow between populations. For example, white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari), which have already lost up to 90% of its habitat in Central America, come within half a kilometer (0.3 mi) of the north side of the road but don’t appear to cross, Poot says.
Now, the Belize government is planning to upgrade the highway, and the zoo is advocating for the inclusion of two major underpasses, as well as smaller modified culverts. Last April, camera trap footage showed a jaguar and her cub using an underpass on the Coastal Highway, which also runs through the corridor. However, that underpass floods during the wet season, making it inaccessible for part of the year.
Poot says that, with the upgrades to the George Price Highway, there’s an opportunity to incorporate well-designed underpasses, making it safer for wildlife — and people.
“No-one wants to hit a tapir,” Poot says. “You’re hitting 450 to 500 lbs [200 to 230 kg].”
Reforestation and fire management
Just a few kilometers east along the highway, down an unmarked dirt road, lies one of Maya Forest Corridor Trust’s most substantial land acquisitions to date, a single parcel of 121 km2 (47 mi2) purchased by Re:wild and other partners in 2021 for $21.5 million.
This area is managed by the WCS Belize on behalf of the Trust. Most of the forest is still relatively intact, says Boris Arevalo, assistant country director at WCS Belize.
However, conservationists plan to reforest a former rice field of around 250 hectares (617 acres). Last year the WCS team started with 50 hectares (124 acres), planting fast-growing sun-loving species in bundles of five every 25 meters (82 feet) along grid lines. The saplings — gumbo-limbo (Bursera simaruba), madre de cacao (Gliricidia sepium), royal palm (Roystonea regia) and others — were sourced from nearby forested areas. Now, the team is building a nursery on site to make the reforestation process easier.
However, Arevalo says that restoration isn’t just about planting trees; it’s also about helping the landscape “recover its functionality” in other ways. In the corridor, that means fire management.
Farmers and ranchers in Belize employ fire to manage their land. But fire is now an increasingly fickle tool.
“When we speak with farmers, they will say, ‘Oh, I burned this time of the year and at this time of the day, because my grandfather and my father used to do it this way. So, it worked for them. That means that it would work for me’ … without really understanding that the changes in our climate are a huge factor that we need to account for,” Avelaro says.
Fire is a growing problem across the Maya Forest Corridor. With increasingly unpredictable rains, agricultural fires are more likely to escape, and cause more damage when they do. Fire-adapted pine forests are burning even more frequently, shifting species composition, and even tropical broadleaf forests, where fire is naturally very rare, are going up in flames.
Last year was especially challenging, says Eli Miller, director of Monkey Bay Sanctuary, a private reserve within the corridor. Mennonite farmers on a large neighboring property used fire to clear forest land, and, in the hot dry windy weather, the flames escaped. In all, the runaway fire burned about 4 km2 (1.56 mi2) of forest in the sanctuary and the adjacent Monkey Bay National Park.
Various groups now collaborate on fire management through the Maya Forest Corridor Trust Fire Working Group. For example, WCS Belize works closely with communities, offering training and helping with equipment. Everyone is concerned about fire, says Avelaro, and this work is also a way to build relationships with local communities, including in the villages to the north of the corridor.
Replanting riverbanks
On the northern edge of the Maya Forest Corridor lies the Community Baboon Sanctuary (CBS), a stepping stone to the Selva Maya.
For 40 years, the sanctuary has been working with seven communities to conserve habitat for the endangered Yucatán black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra), locally known as baboons, via voluntary pledges. These include preserving forested areas along riverbanks, retaining buffer areas around fields, adhering to a management plan, and more. In 2021, the landowners updated pledges and included fire management.
In exchange for these commitments, CBS supports the communities through revenue from ecotourism and grants. For example, they run a homestay program, disperse scholarships and loans, contribute towards property owner’s land taxes, and more.
“Without the community benefiting, honestly, the conservation efforts would be in vain,” says Jessie Young, president of CBS’s Women’s Conservation Group, which manages the initiative. It has been remarkably successful, with the howler monkey population in the sanctuary rising from 800 monkeys in 1985 to more than 5,000 in 2011, the last year conservationists surveyed the population.
People in the communities mostly practice cattle ranching, but lifestyles are changing. CBS, in conjunction with WCS, is now working with a few farmers in the sanctuary on ‘climate-smart’ agricultural projects, including agroforestry.
Arevalo hopes that if farmers are able to diversify their income and increase their productivity, there’s a smaller chance that the land will be converted to large-scale intensive agriculture. It’s all part of making the land surrounding the corridor as wildlife friendly as possible.
But, of late, there is also another — and unlikely — threat to the riparian forests favored by the howler monkeys.
La Ruta Maya is an annual canoe marathon from San Ignacio to Belize City. Originally conceived, in part, to raise environmental awareness, up to 50 teams now compete in the 4-day event, in what has become the biggest sporting event in Belize. Spectators line the banks, with local vendors selling food and drinks. The sport’s popularity has led to some landowners cutting down trees and clearing brush along the riverbanks so fans can get a better view of the race.
“Everywhere we go, in these community meetings, people tell us they are realizing La Ruta Maya has a negative effect,” Young says.
In Flowers Bank, one of the villages in CBS, outside local resident Sharon Robinson’s home, the consequences are all too apparent. Without trees to stabilize the soil, the riverbank has caved in. A couple of years ago, the government installed steel girders at various spots to try to stabilize the riverbank, but it’s only made the problem worse, Robinson says.
In Flowers Bank, one of the villages in CBS, outside local resident Sharon Robinson’s home, the consequences are all too apparent. Trees have been cut down, and the riverbank has caved in. A couple of years ago, the government installed metal barriers at various spots to try to stabilize the riverbank, but that increased erosion around the edges.
Now, CBS and WCS are working with residents to replant the riverbanks, using native species like bullet tree (Bucida buceras), bukut (Cassia grandis), spiny bamboo (Guadua longifolia) and others.
Last week, the group planted canes outside Robinson’s house, and when Young bends to examine them, she sees that, despite the dry weather, some already have fresh shoots.
Creating a wildlife corridor through central Belize was never going to be an easy project, says Kay. “We have some farms in there, we have some forest in there, we have the sugarcane company … so it’s a dynamic that was always a hard project.”
Part of the work has been about raising money to protect land. But it’s also about building relationships and negotiation, she says.
“So I think the vision continues,” she says. “There’s a lot more work on the ground. There’s going to be work forever, because the threats are not going to go away.”
Banner image: A Yucatán black howler monkey, photographed in Mexico. The Community Baboon Sanctuary, a member of the Maya Forest Corridor Coalition, is a pioneering conservation initiative that works with communities to protect habitat for the endangered Yucatan black howler monkeys. Image by Umberto Nicoletti via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Agriculture, illegal ranching and roads threaten the jaguar in Mesoamerica
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