By Rupununi Wildlife Research Unit, 21st November 2025
Administrative Region 9 of south-western Guyana is locally called ‘the Rupununi‘, after the river and savannah that share its name. This part of Guyana is beloved by many near and far for its magical essence that really must be experienced to be truly understood. This enchanting quality is partly rooted in amazing stories from history—Sir Walter Raleigh believed it to be the final location of the mythical golden city of El Dorado; the legendary curare arrow poison was perfected here and helped Indigenous peoples resist slavers and raiders during the colonial era; and the flattop tepui mountains in the north-west served as the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World; to name just a few. However, the modern spirit of the Rupununi is inextricably linked to the beauty and diversity of its natural environment, which is matched only by the richness of its culture and the kindness and generosity of its people.
Figure 1: A resident of Moco Moco village looks over the Kanuku Mountains, indicating the boundaries of traditional farming and hunting grounds. Photo: Matt Hallett.
The Rupununi is at the heart of the Guiana Shield, one of the world’s last frontier tropical forests, but the region also hosts one of the Neotropics most intact savannah ecosystems, as well as the critically important Rupununi wetlands. With an abundance and diversity of intact habitats, the Rupununi is also affectionately referred to as the ‘Land of Giants’ for supporting healthy populations of the continent’s largest and most charismatic species—the jaguar, giant anteater, anaconda, giant river turtle, lowland tapir, bird-eating tarantula, giant armadillo, black spider monkey, giant river otter and more.
While tropical forests and wetlands are widely recognized as biodiverse ecosystems, South American savannahs are generally understudied and undervalued for the ecosystem services that they provide. But when it comes to the biological diversity of the Rupununi, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. The region is actually a mosaic composed of a diverse patchwork of habitats, with boundaries that are blurred across transitional zones maintained by interactions between elevation, climate, herbivory, soil, flooding and, the most important factor for maintaining savannah–forest boundaries, fire. These areas where habitats meet and mix, termed ecotones, are prioritized in conservation because they host a large amount of biodiversity within a relatively small area. How large-bodied, wide-ranging mammals utilize these dynamic landscapes is poorly understood. However, the Rupununi also hosts a growing regional capital and 57 Indigenous communities that maintain traditional livelihoods dependent on farming, fishing and hunting. How human activities may further impact the array of biotic and abiotic relationships within this diverse landscape is unknown.
Figure 2: A member of our research team walks among savannah and bush island habitats in the shadows of the Pakaraima mountains. Photo: Matt Hallett.
A region-wide camera–trap study seeking to understand drivers of the distribution and abundance of Rupununi wildlife is something that our group had been discussing for some time. However, the cost and complicated logistics of operating at this scale had prevented us from taking on such a project. Support from the Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme Guyana, an EU–funded project that seeks to ‘strengthen wildlife conservation with the well-being of rural communities through an approach emphasizing the rights of local communities‘, made this project a reality.
Figure 3: Participants learn how to set a camera trap from Rupununi Wildlife Research Unit co-founder, Dr. Matt Hallett, during an open training course. Photo: Nathalie van Vliet.
Going from envisioning a large-scale project to executing one certainly provides a sudden dose of reality, but we are fortunate to be able to rely on the Rupununi’s greatest resource—its people. To start, we shared general information about our project to community members (explaining what we were doing, and why and how camera traps collect the data we need) through the SWM Programme’s Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) process. Next, we facilitated camera trap and habitat assessment training courses that were open to interested community members and worked with village leadership to identify experienced hunters with knowledge of large mammal movement and behaviour. Lastly, our leadership team tapped experienced local researchers to be regional leads tasked with transporting and maintaining equipment, securing data and providing in-field training and support to field teams in each community. In the end, we trained > 100 Rupununi residents and employed > 65 local researchers who set, checked and collected every camera trap, took habitat measurements at every location, and downloaded and organized every photo. While the international members of our team took on the lion’s share of the data processing, analysis and writing of the main article, our local team maintained participation throughout this process—verifying the interpretation of results and conclusions based on their knowledge of local culture, context and conditions. Each of our regional leads and members of our leadership team are recognized as co-authors for their intellectual contribution to the main paper.
Figure 4: Members of the South Pakaraima research team set a camera trap with guidance from regional team leader, Andrew Albert. Photo: Matt Hallett.
In all, researchers from Makushi and Wapichan communities across the Rupununi set camera traps at 199 locations across an area > 40,000 km2, covering each of the region’s major subregions and habitat types, during both the dry and rainy seasons. These cameras totalled 16,382 trap nights, yielded 485,953 photographs of 24,800 occasions, and documented an astonishing 143 species (47 mammals, 82 birds, 11 reptiles, 3 amphibians), including 20 listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. A video highlighting some of the best images from our camera trap survey can be found here.
This video highlights our favourite photos and includes most of the species captured by our camera traps:
Through this study, we filled key knowledge gaps on reproductive seasons for important game species, identified forest cover as the single most important variable to the mammal community, and determined that individual species are impacted differently by human activities such as fire, timber harvest, hunting, road collisions and conflict with livestock. It is our hope that these data inform management planning processes at multiple levels from Guyana’s Protected Areas Commission and National harvest quotas to regional conservation plans for species or taxonomic groups and village improvement plans. In fact, the data from our South Rupununi sites recently supported an effort by our project partners, South Rupununi Conservation Society, in facilitating an inter-community agreement creating a 150,000-hectare Community Conservation Area. Our hope is that this project is just one step towards our overall goal of leveraging research tools to help Rupununi communities balance important traditional and contemporary livelihood activities in the face of rapid socio-economic and climate change.
Figure 5: Medium and large-bodied mammals overall were significantly more difficult to detect closer to villages, and their presence decreased significantly in gallery forest habitat and increased significantly with the percentage of forest cover (centre). The presence or absence of individual species varied greatly among variables of interest, as shown in the images around the perimeter. Positive relationships with a given variable are indicated with a (+), negative with a (-), statistical significance is indicated by a * and strong statistical significance with **. Photos: Rupununi Wildlife Research Unit.
Part of the Rupununi Wildlife Research Unit leadership team (left to right): Fernando Li, Chris Li, Asaph Wilson, Rhomayne Li, Dexter da Silva, Matt Hallett, Howard Barnabas, Eian Gray, Jeremy Melville, Andrew Alberts, Courtney Peters. Photo: Rupununi Wildlife Research Unit.
The article, ‘Drivers of medium- and large-bodied terrestrial mammal communities within a savannah–forest mosaic on Makushi and Wapichan customary lands in the Rupununi, Guyana’, is available open access in Oryx—The International Journal of Conservation.
