In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I follow the broken edges of the forest—the roads cutting through Indigenous territories, the degraded corridors between ecosystems, the unprotected landscapes sitting just outside national park boundaries—and the people stitching it back together. Juliana Martins, a road ecologist and PhD candidate at Imperial College London, has spent years working alongside the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon, whose nightly closure of the BR-174 highway has produced the longest-running citizen science roadkill monitoring project in road ecology history and measurably higher wildlife diversity inside their territory than outside it. Ben Valks of the Black Jaguar Foundation is six years into one of the largest rewilding projects on earth: a 2,600-kilometer biodiversity corridor reconnecting the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna through a 17-step restoration approach, farmer by farmer, across a landscape the size of the distance from Boston to Miami. And Bruno Paladines of Nature and Culture International helped unite six Ecuadorian provinces and Indigenous nationalities under a single conservation agreement, the Amazonian Platform, to protect 60,000 square kilometers of intact, connected forest that had no formal protection at all. This episode is about landscape scale: what it takes to stop a forest from falling apart, and what becomes possible when the people who have always belonged to the land are finally given the tools to protect it.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Spider Monkey Wakeup
01:38 Roads And Fragmentation
02:21 Road Ecology Explained
04:12 Highway Through Indigenous Land
06:47 Night Closures Save Wildlife
08:48 Canopy Bridges Solution
10:05 Rethinking Road Building
12:46 Mega Corridor Restoration
17:00 How Black Jaguar Restores
18:06 Winning Farmers Trust
20:03 Wildlife Returns Fast
21:08 Protecting the Ecuador Amazon
24:25 Amazonian Platform Strategy
26:26 Future Fund Governance
28:23 Unified Voice At COP
29:47 Jaguar Refuge Buffer Zone
31:46 Connectivity And Next Steps

CREDITS
Executive Producer & Host: Brooke Mitchell
Associate Producer & Music Composer: Brad Parsons

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DISCLAIMER
The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own research and consult primary sources where it matters.