Jaguar recovery unites Brazil and Argentina in conservation effort

The dark rosettes dotting the golden-brown fur of the jaguar are no longer a rare sight in Brazil’s Iguaçu National Park. In 2010, the protected area’s population of jaguars (Panthera onca) was on the brink of local extinction. Now, thanks to persistent conservation efforts led by Yara Barros, a biologist and executive coordinator of the Jaguars of Iguaçu Project, the big cats’ numbers have more than doubled.

The recovery is a triumph, but it represents more than just a win for the species. Part of the Atlantic Forest biome, straddling the Brazil-Argentina border, Iguaçu has become a prime example of how large carnivore conservation can help strengthen and rebuild a fragmented ecosystem, benefiting predators, prey and people across borders.

“To maintain a jaguar population in the long term means [the ecosystem] is healthy and balanced,” Barros told Mongabay. “The jaguar is an indicator of environmental quality. We usually say: ‘Where there are jaguars, there’s life.’”

Building human-wildlife coexistence

Paraná state in the south of Brazil, where Iguaçu is located, lost about 13% of its forest cover between 2000 and 2020, largely a consequence of economic development. This loss disrupted the natural balance of the ecosystem, often forcing jaguars to adapt their hunting behavior and increasing their interactions with humans and their livestock. Retaliatory killings due to cattle predation have become a major threat to jaguars in the region.

Between 1990 and 1995, the Green Corridor, a 185,000-hectare (457,000-acre) stretch of protected land that links Argentina’s Iguazú National Park and Brazil’s Iguaçu, was home to between 400 and 800 jaguars. By 2005, that number had dropped to just 40; in 2009, there were about 11 jaguars left in Brazil’s Iguaçu National Park.

Today, the number of jaguars within the Brazilian side of the park has reached at least 28, and, across the corridor, the population has more than doubled to at least 105.

Cross-border efforts have been central to the jaguar’s comeback in this region, especially the collaboration between Barros and her team in Brazil and Proyecto Yaguareté, a conservation project in Argentina. Strategies to ensure this population growth have included community outreach and engagement, monitoring and documenting jaguars, and education campaigns targeting both farmers and schools.

“This cross-border collaboration is crucial for jaguar conservation,” Sebastián Di Martino, conservation director at the NGO Rewilding Argentina, told Mongabay. “The population in [the Iguazú-Iguaçu region] is still there and, in the last few years, it’s growing. Now it seems that it’s stable thanks to this collaboration.”

The benefits of protecting jaguars have rippled across the park’s wider ecosystem. Jaguars are an umbrella species, which means that conserving them ensures habitat protection for a wide range of other animals. Jaguar monitoring data provide insights into ecosystem health and can shape broader conservation strategies that also protect other wildcats in the region: pumas (Puma concolor), margays (Leopardus wiedii), ocelots (Leopardus pardalis) and southern tiger cats (Leopardus guttulus).

“It’s one of the most important populations of jaguars remaining in the Atlantic Forest and it’s the biggest population remaining in the interior of this biome,” Di Martino said.

Communities boost conservation efforts

To protect the big cats, Barros and her team focus on research, coexistence, and engagement — “to make people fall in love with jaguars, to turn fear into fascination,” she said.

From educational talks in schools to visiting nearly 2,000 properties and responding to 137 predation incidents, they’ve started to change local perceptions of the big cat. Today, instead of killing jaguars, landowners first reach out to Barros’s team to resolve conflicts. Deterrents, such as lights that flash at random intervals at night to keep jaguars away from livestock herds, coupled with better livestock management and predation prevention training, have helped reduce cattle losses, save jaguar lives, and strengthen human-wildlife relationships.

“A lot of fear comes from not understanding,” Barros said. “When someone calls us saying they saw a jaguar or had an incident, we respond immediately — even in the middle of the night. This builds trust that we’re here to help solve the problem, so they don’t feel they have to kill the jaguar.”

The team has also found novel ways to protect jaguars.

The area surrounding the park is home to some 500,000 residents, and it’s here where Barros’s team supports the Jaguar Crocheteers project. A women-led initiative, it currently includes 17 local artisans in three municipalities who crochet jaguar-themed items for sale and awareness campaigns. For many of these women, this has become their main source of income, Barros said.

“It’s created a strong connection with the jaguars — and also among the municipalities themselves,” said Claudiane Tavares, a project supply coordinator at the Jaguar Crocheteers and also one of the initiative’s members. “It’s not often we’re able to connect people from different towns around a shared cause. But all of them are united by the jaguars.”

The Jaguars of Iguaçu Project has also influenced institutions in more formal ways. In 2023, it partnered with the airport in Foz do Iguaçu to turn it into the first airport in Brazil to be certified “Jaguar Friendly.” That means it supports research, provides jaguar-themed information to travelers, and implements safety measures to prevent wildlife incursions.

The jaguar conservation efforts have often faced hurdles.

In 2021, authorities revived a plan to reopen the Estrada do Colono (Colono Road), which would cut through Iguaçu National Park. The plan met with fierce backlash after conservationists said it would further fragment the jaguars’ habitat and increase access into the park for poachers. Barros was among those who opposed the proposal.

The plan was shelved in the face of the public outcry and legal interventions. Since then, the Paraná state government has reinforced its commitment to big cat conservation, becoming the first Brazilian state to create a dedicated conservation program. In March 2024 it published its Technical Report of the State Action Plan (PAE), developed in collaboration with researchers, state and federal government agencies, civil society and landowners living near Iguaçu National Park. The PAE lays out a five-year road map for the recovery of jaguar and puma populations in the region.

It focuses on restoring and connecting habitats, curbing hunting and vehicle strikes, mitigating disease, strengthening rescue and rehabilitation protocols, and promoting human-wildlife coexistence. One of the priority areas includes the Green Corridor that stretches over Paraná.

“Having a strategic plan is essential to conserve endangered species,” Valdemar Bernando Jorge, the state’s secretary for sustainable development, said at the time of the report’s launch. “[The PAE] represents an important step toward the conservation of Paraná’s biodiversity and reflects the state’s long-term commitment.”

Another challenge is ensuring a sustainable jaguar population. While jaguar numbers are growing, the cats remain in isolated clusters of protected areas, Di Martino said. Efforts to link these groups will be critical to ensure the long-term survival of the species.

“What is challenging about this population is that it’s completely isolated from other populations of jaguars,” Di Martino said. “If we want that population to survive in the long term, we will need to keep the work that they are doing but also start to think about how we connect that population with other jaguars.”

Next steps for jaguar conservation

Barros’s efforts to protect the jaguars have not gone unnoticed. In April 2025, she won the Whitley Award from the Whitley Fund for Nature, a U.K. charity supporting grassroots conservation leaders in the Global South. Her team will use the 50,000 pound ($67,500) cash prize to strengthen jaguar conservation by improving livestock management, increasing the number of antipredation devices to reduce livestock losses, and expanding its reach to include stakeholders in neighboring Paraguay, where jaguar habitats are also under threat.

Challenges persist. Jaguars in South America have disappeared from more than half of their historical range. The Amazon Rainforest represents the largest stronghold for the species; for some smaller populations outside it, such as those in the Atlantic Forest, jaguars are listed as critically endangered.

The rise in jaguar numbers in the Iguaçu-Iguazú region shows that reviving populations is possible when holistic approaches are taken. The key, Barros said, is to promote coexistence between people, livelihoods and jaguars.

“We want people to be enchanted by jaguars,” she said. “We want people to stop seeing them as just big cats and start seeing them as a magnificent species that just wants to exist.”

Banner image: Thanks to cross-border collaboration, the number of jaguars across the Brazil-Argentina Green Corridor has more than doubled in the last 13 years, with 93 individuals across the Iguaçu-Iguazú site. Image © Whitley Awards.

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