This map shows the retraction of the jaguar habitat and its links to the expansion of urbanization processes by correlating the Jaguar Corridor with information on tree cover loss from the Classifying Drivers of Tree Cover Loss (CDTC), and land-use from the Three Global Conditions for Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use (3Cs)*.Three broad territorial conditions were defined to evaluate land-use drivers and human pressures:

• Cities and Farms: areas where half the land is occupied by cities, roads, cultivation, and intensive grazing.
• Shared Lands: areas with significant untransformed natural conditions and substantial land uses.
• Wild Areas: predominantly natural areas with light land use (Locke et al., 2019).

The region has been mostly urbanized from its southern and northern extremes, and the habitat of the jaguar, historically ranging from south-central Argentina up to south-western USA, has shrunk accordingly.

The Amazon is the largest remaining habitat for the jaguar. By 1900, the Amazon encompassed less than half of the jaguar’s historic range. Nowadays, it accounts for almost 80% of the Jaguar Corridor.

The Jaguar Corridor is a contested territory where socio-environmental justice movements resist and serve as frontiers of extraction and waste disposal for the industrial economy. This map correlates the Jaguar Corridor with the inventory of the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJA), which collects data on Ecological Distribution Conflicts from activists and scholars. 

• 30% of the EJA’s documented cases in the hemisphere are in proximity to the Jaguar Corridor (the Corridor only accounts for 8.5% of the continental area of the Americas territory).
• Three countries account for over half of the total documented struggles: Brazil (23.3%), Colombia (18.32%), and Ecuador (14.7%).
• Almost half of the cases occur in the Amazon, mostly in Brazil (42.4%). 
• A third of the cases within the Jaguar Corridor are related to the extraction of mineral ores and building materials; a quarter of the struggles are related to biomass and land conflicts; and struggles over fossil fuels and water management account for 15% each. 
• The actors behind these environmental injustices include governmental entities, development banks, and most often multinational companies.
• Over a third of the Jaguar Corridor is recognized as Indigenous territory and Indigenous groups are the most frequent groups mobilizing against land dispossession and the extraction and commodification of natures. 
• Among other actors mobilizing are Afro-descendent communities, ethnically/racially discriminated groups, landless peasants, fisher people, river people, women, waste pickers, informal workers, artisanal miners, and local and international Environmental Justice Organizations.

Critical areas for the jaguar’s survival are also places where various marginalized communities and coalitions have struggled and continue to struggle for socio-environmental justice. 

This heat map provides an integrated database of the urban landscapes by overlapping the Jaguar Corridor with the public databases used in the first two sections (Stronghold Against Urbanization and Contested Territories): 

• Tree cover loss (from the Classifying Drivers of Tree Cover Loss)
• Land-use (from the Three Global Conditions for Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use). 
• Ecological Distribution Conflicts (from the Environmental Justice Atlas)

Because critical zones are the most detectable of the fragmented landscapes, these areas of friction can also become potential areas to reformulate the terms of cohabitation across the Jaguar Corridor.