A new study has found that a big chunk of Arizona and New Mexico could be viable jaguar habitat.
The paper, published in the journal Oryx, found that roughly 20 million acres of land in the two southwestern states could support as many as 150 jaguars, which are considered endangered. That’s many times the size of the area the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had previously designatedas critical jaguar habitat.
“They need to start looking at the possibility of recovering the jaguar in the United States now that we've shown that there's habitat available for at a minimum 150 jaguars,” said Michael Robinson, a senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, and one of the study’s authors.
The vast swath of land the authors call the Central Arizona/New Mexico Recovery Area stretches from the Grand Canyon all the way to the Gila Wilderness.
