Reconnecting the Canopy: Safe Passage for Wildlife

Our Land

Costa Rica’s Caribbean region is one of the most biodiverse places in the world, but it is changing fast. Forests that once allowed wildlife to move freely through the canopy are increasingly fragmented by roads, tourism development, electrical infrastructure, and expanding communities. In some areas, sloths and monkeys are now forced to descend to the ground or cross dangerous electrical lines simply to move between trees.

Why This Work Began

The Jaguar Rescue Center (JRC) was founded in 2008 after our team began seeing more and more injured and displaced wildlife arriving from these growing pressures. Over time, we realized many of the injuries we were treating, especially electrocutions, falls, vehicle collisions, and fragmentation-related trauma, were happening repeatedly in the same places and were often preventable. Rescue work remained essential, but over time it became clear how rescue alone could never fully solve the problem.

What We Are Building

Today, JRC’s work stretches way beyond rehabilitation and release. Together, local residents, volunteers, scientists, schools, businesses, Indigenous and rural communities, and Costa Rica’s national electricity provider (ICE), help identify wildlife mortality hotspots and implement practical solutions including insulated electrical infrastructure and canopy crossings that reconnect fragmented habitat and allow safer wildlife movement. Indeed, many rescues today begin with calls from community members who really know the landscape and recognize when wildlife is in danger.

Because JRC responds directly to wildlife emergencies across the region, our rescue and monitoring data also help identify the exact infrastructure hotspots where prevention efforts are most urgently needed. Since 2017, JRC has worked together with ICE and Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) to reduce wildlife electrocutions and reconnect fragmented canopy pathways across Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean. Together, the partnership has helped insulate 19 km of power lines, protect 28 transformers, and install 15 aerial wildlife crossings in high-risk areas identified through field rescue and monitoring data. Yet significant risk still remains across the corridor. Field assessments have identified more than 160 dangerous electrical spans and dozens of hazardous transformers that continue to threaten wildlife movement and survival.

At its core, this work is about coexistence. Wildlife survival, forest connectivity, and community stewardship are deeply linked, especially in regions where biodiversity and human development increasingly overlap. Every insulated line and restored canopy crossing creates another chance for wildlife to move safely through the forest again.

Community & Coexistence

Our work is deeply rooted in Limón, one of Costa Rica’s most economically vulnerable regions, but also one of its richest in biodiversity. Through Jaguar Rescue Community, we work with schools, families, educators, and local leaders to make conservation more accessible and community-led. It is no surprise that children who visit the sanctuary often come back later with their schools or families and seeing themselves not just as visitors, but as protectors of the forest around them.

A Future Still Possible

Some animals, like Skye, a young howler monkey who survived severe electrocution injuries as a baby, are eventually able to return to the forest. Today she spends her days moving through the trees alongside other howlers as she prepares for eventual release back into the wild. And its moments like these that serve as a reminder that reconnecting canopy pathways and reducing preventable injuries can directly shape whether wildlife survives and thrives in the future.

How Funding Will Help

In 2025 alone, JRC treated more than 1,400 wild animals while continuing to expand wildlife-safe infrastructure, canopy connectivity, ecosystem recovery, and environmental education efforts across the region. Should the JRC’s project be selected, support from this opportunity would help us expand canopy crossings, wildlife-safe electrical infrastructure, mapping, monitoring, and long-term prevention efforts across high-risk wildlife corridors before further biodiversity loss occurs.

Our goal is not only to rescue wildlife after harm happens, but to help restore safer movement, healthier ecosystems, and long-term coexistence between people and wildlife across Costa Rica’s Caribbean forests.