About the Flora & Fauna of Suriname guide

This guide lists every species of animal, plant and fungus with at least one record from Suriname in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF): 18,442 species at the last update, from museum specimens collected since the 1700s to photos shared last week.

6,124 species have a full profile. A profile needs a real description (a Wikipedia article in at least one of our four languages, not a one-line stub) and a photo or a common name. Every other species is on the checklist of its group, with a link to its records, so nothing that has been found in Suriname is left out.

Names come from iNaturalist and Wikidata, which collect the official common names used in each language. Many tropical species simply have no name in Dutch, Spanish or Chinese yet; then we show the English or scientific name rather than inventing one.

Sranan Tongo and Surinamese Dutch names are added by hand, one by one, and only when a source clearly ties the name to the species. They link to our Sranan Tongo dictionary. Some local names cover a whole group (popokai is any parrot); those are labelled as a general name.

Status in Suriname comes from the checklists of the National Zoological Collection of Suriname (NZCS) and the Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species. World status is the IUCN Red List category.

Photos are only used when the photographer allows reuse (CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, or public domain), and every photo is credited with its licence. Descriptions are the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia, shown in your language when available and credited under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Records are not proof of abundance: a species with ten thousand bird-watching records is not necessarily more common than a beetle with one museum specimen. Records with wrong identifications also exist; if you spot one, or know a local name we are missing, please tell us.