About
A small desk in southern Guyana
Forest Dispatch is an independent newsroom covering wildlife, conservation science and the people doing the work in the Kanuku Mountains Protected Area, southern Guyana.
Why we exist
Most reporting on the Guiana Shield is written from Georgetown, or from further away still. The people who walk these transects, service the cameras and write the survey reports are rarely the ones quoted.
We started in 2019 with one transect and a borrowed camera. The idea was simple: publish the field record as it happens, including the parts that go wrong, and pay the rangers who collect it.
We are not a campaigning organisation. We do not take money from mining, logging or from any organisation whose work we might be expected to cover favourably.
How we work
Field observations are checked by at least two people before publication. Species identifications we cannot verify are labelled provisional, and we say so plainly in the copy rather than in a footnote.
Locations of sensitive records are withheld. Where a record could put an animal or a survey team at risk, we publish the protected area and nothing finer.
Corrections are published at the top of the affected article, with the date and what changed. We have published four since 2019.
The desk
Elena Ferreira
Field editor
Twelve years covering the Guiana Shield. Based in Lethem.
D. Ramkarran
Reporter
Rivers, roads and the politics of access in Region Nine.
Priya Nauth
Science desk
Mycology and soil ecology. Reviews every method note we publish.
Joel Simmons
Camera-trap unit
Maintains the forty-eight station network in the Kanukus.