Jaguar Lens is a project of critical cartography and visual narratives that aims to render visible how urbanization processes and socio-environmental struggles are entangled and in friction with the Jaguar Corridor.
This project uses mapping as a tool to weave multispecies landscapes across the Americas through the lens of the jaguar. Access the cartography and download all the geospatial information used to make it. Navigate the complex landscapes of this socio-cultural project in the diorama section. Find out more about this project, collaborators, and contact.
Rather than an exclusive matter of conservation, largely reliant on philanthropy and private investment, the Jaguar Corridor is a public matter of care and responsibility, and an opportunity to radically reimagine possible landscapes of cohabitation.
The jaguar (Panthera onca) is the Americas’ largest cat and top predator. Indigenous communities across the Americas have regarded the jaguar as a master spirit, and biologists consider the jaguar an “umbrella species”. Its presence in a territory reveals information about the conditions that allow humans and other forms of life to flourish or decline.
We tend to assume that jaguars are distant and separate from urban life, but urbanization processes have encroached upon their habitat. The jaguar habitat ranged from the Low Monte in Southeastern Argentina to the deserts and xeric shrublands in the Southern United States. Over the past century, cities, roads, dams, agro-industrial and extractive landscapes, and other infrastructures have altered ecologies, fragmenting and diminishing the jaguar habitat to half its range.
The Jaguar Corridor Initiative is a large-scale landscape connectivity project that emerged in 2000 to protect jaguars and their environments by bridging jaguar populations from northern Argentina to northern Mexico.