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Courtney Menzies was at the ceremony today in western Belize, and has this story.

The Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve is Belize's first nature reserve, and with over 6,000 acres, it protects a thousand species of plants, 55 mammal species, and over 340 bird species - and including some endangered and vulnerable animals.

And the rangers who look after this reserve have an extremely important task, which they've been carrying out while residing in less than ideal conditions. But now, they have a brand new ranger station, - the Jaguar Station - and according to the Belize Karst Habitat Conservation, it's not any ordination station.

Aaron Juan, BKHC Executive Director
"For the ranger team and the researchers, this building means a lot, it's safety, it's comfort and when we decided to go with this style of structure, we had to do so some talking, some discussion, some convincing because why aren't we getting sort of the norm so to speak whereby most small ranger stations are wooden structures, usually we have just the Mennonite houses, it would have been much quicker and much cheaper. We were working within a budget of 100,000 Belize dollars and as we quickly found out, there's no way we could have completed this concrete structure with 100,000 Belize dollars but we pushed on."

Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"They have done a job that is commendable, the work that we see here now, the construction of the ranger station is certainly important because you can't have rangers in an accommodation where they were for too long so this is definitely a big improvement."

And Minister Habet emphasized the importance of the location of this reserve.

Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"We have a lot of things here to protect, you have a very important eco-system, an area of very large biodiversity for wildlife but important also as we mentioned, the issue of water. on one side you have the Barton Creek, on the other side we have the Roaring Creek and they have also commenced doing some work in water testing for water quality because you have communities that are close by, the buffer communities that you don't know what going into the streams and rivers. Also we have to look even further up in the Mountain Pine Ridge where the Roaring River originates, we have to look at those headwaters because now it's not a matter of quality, it's quantity, how much water is coming out because there's some development in that area."

"Certainly very important for conservation and also because you have these buffering communities around this area and as I mentioned in my talk we have to look out for the livelihood of the people and if they are not comfortable, they don't have a source of income, then they will come into the reserve to find something to do."

And while the project itself amounted to $450,000, about a quarter of that was funded by the Global Environment Facility Small Grant Program. The National Coordinator explained why they decided to collaborate with KARST.

Leonel Requena, National Coordinator, GEF/SGP
"They're doing amazing work to protect nature and when we protect nature and invest in people we will always have positive returns and we need to invest in safeguarding the wealth untold that we have here and we need to also replicate and upscale this model in other communities and in other protected areas so on behalf of the GEF Small Grants Program, we congratulate the Ministry of Sustainable Development, the National Biodiversity Office and Belize KARST Conservation for doing an amazing work here, protecting nature and investing in conservation efforts here."

And while the reserve is named after the national animal, the station got its name because of the jaguars and pumas that have been seen lurking around the area.