In Costa Rica commerce of the macaw was reduced after an environmental education program was initiated in 1998 by George Powell and his research team. In 1998 this research team, later united as Centro Científico Tropical, devised a conservation plan with an alliance of 18 different organizations known as the San Juan-La Selva Biological Corridor which would protect the habitat of the great green macaw. An earlier iteration of this plan had first been proposed in 1985 by the first revolutionary Sandinista government in the midst of the US-sponsored Contras insurgency, as an international ecological peace park (SI-A-PAZ), but the binational agreements with the Costa Rican government were never carried out, so instead Nicaragua established the vast Áreas Naturales Protegidas del Sureste de Nicaragua in the southeast, and a similar block of land in the northeast bordering Honduras. After the elections the new Nicaraguan government reduced and carved up these blocks of land between 1997 and 1999, which then became a number of new and much smaller reserves. Much of this land was actually set aside in 1987 to be governed by the indigenous population of these regions, such as the Rama and Kriol people, which has created legal conflict. The Indio-Maíz Biological Reserve remains the main refuge for this species in the two countries. The new biological corridor plan entailed the creation of the Maquenque National Wildlife Refuge in Costa Rica in 2005, which helps connect the six previously existing protected areas of the Tortuguero National Park and La Selva Biological Station in the Cordillera Central in Costa Rica, with the Barra del Colorado Wildlife Refuge, the Indio-Maíz Biological Reserve, Punta Gorda Natural Reserve and the Cerro Silva Natural Reserve in Nicaragua, thereby allowing animals to move between the regions. The plan was considered a success in 2012. The macaws migrate to the mountains in northern central Costa Rica after breeding, for example to Braulio Carrillo National Park. A national prohibition of the cutting of almendro de montaña (Dipteryx oleifera) trees was also engineered by the Centro Científico Tropical. Experimental D. oleifera plantations have also been established around Sarapiquí, which appear to show the species is acceptable for commercial silviculture. The Costa Rican NGO Ara Manzanillo has released 60 captive-bred birds in Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge near Puerto Viejo de Talamanca (Old Harbour), southeasternmost coastal Costa Rica, as of 2019.