[RI-32] Rapid Inventory 32 - Guyana: Acarai-Corentyne Corridor - Expedition/Field Trip (05 Nov 2024 - 24 Nov 2024)

Description
High in the Acarai Mountains along Guyana’s southern border, a rainstorm races across the canopy. Every drop of pelting rain will eventually end up in the Atlantic Ocean, on Guyana’s northern coast, following one of two distinct routes. Some trickles will feed the headwater creeks and tributaries of Guyana’s largest river, the Essequibo, while others will find their way into the headwaters of the equally majestic New River. For 400 sinuous kilometers, these two rivers run parallel to each other, tumbling over rapids and waterfalls, on their separate paths to the ocean. Between them lies the Acarai-Corentyne Corridor, a 1.5 million-hectare wilderness stretching 275 km from the south, where it borders Brazil, to the north, where it borders Suriname. Along the way, this remote and isolated landscape descends nearly 800 m, giving way to a vast, unbroken expanse of rainforest and a spectacular diversity of plants and animals—millions of towering trees, enormous food fishes, and prowling apex predators. Throughout the landscape, ancient petroglyphs inscribe a complex history of human habitation, and a deep well of local knowledge persists in the Waiwai, Wapishana, Trio, and Macushi peoples in nearby Indigenous communities. Administered for decades by the Guyana Forestry Commission, the corridor has remained remarkably intact, aside from a scattering of mining concessions. Were that mining to spread as it has across the continent, it would be calamitous for the headwater creeks that nourish Guyana’s great rivers. Warding off this threat is paramount to stewarding the corridor’s pristine headwaters into the future. We envision an Acarai-Corentyne Corridor that advances Guyana’s national biodiversity and development goals, anchors the world’s largest remaining expanse of tropical forest, sustains clean drinking water and immense stores of carbon—where Guyana’s largest vertebrates flourish and where deep, local knowledge is parlayed to safeguard and manage this national treasure, elevating Guyana’s southern wilderness into the realm of Kaieteur Falls, Iwokrama Rainforest, and the Rupununi Savanna.