Suriname and the Guyana shield

The word "Guyana" is believed to mean "land of many waters", a fitting description for this region of northern South America that is essentially an island of land, bounded by the waters of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the north and east, the Rio Orinoco to the west and the Rio Negro and Rio Amazonas to the south. This large area, which includes all of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, as well as parts of Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil, is the largest expanse of undisturbed tropical rain forest in the world.

Underlying the entire region is a massive geological formation known as the Guyana Shield, a two-billion-year-old, Pre-Cambrian formation. For countless millennia, the Guyana Shield has supported a great diversity of flora and fauna. There are an estimated 138 unique tree genera in the region's lowland forests, and the overall level of plant endemism (species that occur only in a particular region and nowhere else) in the Guyana Shield is believed to be about forty percent.

With a land area of 163,820 square kilometers and a human population of 425,000, Suriname is one of the least densely populated countries in the world. Furthermore, the population center is in the Capital City, Paramaribo, and smaller towns in the coastal region. The remaining population in the interior is located mostly in scattered villages along three of the major rivers. The fact that the interior of Suriname - covered with undisturbed Neotropical Amazonian forest - is largely uninhabited makes it one of the most important places anywhere in the world for tropical forest conservation.