Central Suriname Nature Reserve

One of the largest untouched tracts of rainforest anywhere

Sixteen thousand square kilometres of primary tropical forest, montane and lowland, taking in part of the Guyana Highlands, and it is genuinely untouched. The reserve was assembled in 1998 by Conservation International together with the government of Suriname, by fusing three that already existed: Raleighvallen, Tafelberg and the Eilerts de Haan mountains. UNESCO listed it in 2000. Material support came from the Microsoft co-founder Jeff Harbers.

What lives there is the argument for it. More than 5,000 plant species have been identified. Jaguar, giant armadillo and eight species of primate are present. Birders come for the Guianan cock-of-the-rock, and the rivers here run in rapids rather than slow brown channels. A research station sits at the foot of Voltzberg.

It is also a place scientists actually measure, which is rarer than it sounds for somewhere this remote. The reserve is one of seven sites worldwide in the TEAM network, alongside Bwindi in Uganda, the Udzungwa Mountains in Tanzania, Bukit Barisan Selatan in Indonesia, Nam Kading in Laos, Manaus in Brazil and the Volcan Barva transect in Costa Rica. Camera traps are set at a density of one every two square kilometres, in two arrays of thirty, placed north and south of the Coppename River, and the mammal data they returned between 2008 and 2010 has been published openly.

That matters for a reserve whose selling point is that nothing has happened to it. Pristine is easy to assert and hard to demonstrate, and a standing grid of cameras is how you turn the claim into a measurement that somebody else can check.