Reconnecting Forests, One Wild Corridor at a Time

In 2007, an NGO was founded with the sole purpose of regrowing a forest corridor, linking isolated patches of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, and saving the endangered golden lion tamarin. The cherry on top? The organization has since grown to have reforestation projects all over the world.

“Fast forward 15 years: That’s a lovely forest. The satellite images are really quite impressive. It’s completely connected,” explains conservation scientist Stuart Pimm, who founded Saving Nature. “The [reserve] is no longer isolated… We found the [wild] species came back, moving through the corridors an awful lot faster than we [expected]. It’s warm and wet and the trees grow fast.”

Saving Nature – formally called Saving Species until 2019 – launched its project Fazenda Dourada (Golden Farm in Portuguese) specifically to help save the golden lion tamarin, a flagship species whose habitat had shrunk considerably. Saving Nature raised the money necessary to acquire the first 100-hectare corridor which was then given to a local partner NGO, the Golden Lion Tamarin Association; they purchased the land for reforestation and handed it over to the União Biological Reserve. Today, the area covers 20,000 hectares of continuous forest, tenfold the area of the original fragment. Over the years, Saving Nature has created 14 corridor and forest protection projects in six countries. The NGO has projects underway in South America, Asia, and Africa. “The only thing we need to do now is more of the same.”