Photos from the field:

Even if few will never experience it directly, most people in the UK have heard of the Amazon. And most people will know it's an area that needs urgent protection from deforestation.

Protecting the Amazon isn’t just crucial for the amazing range of plants and animals that live there, it’s also vitally important to the whole world. The rainforest helps absorb the carbon we produce and stores one-tenth of the world’s reserves of carbon dioxide. So we need to protect and restore the rainforest if we’re to win the fight against climate change.

WWF has a range of projects in the Amazon. I travelled to the state of Acre in north-west Brazil to meet WWF colleagues and help set up some new jaguar monitoring work.

Our project is in the Chico Mendes Reserve, which is home to not only jaguars, but also other fascinating species like howler monkeys and tapirs, as well as around 10,000 people.

The local population depends on the forest for their livelihoods: for harvesting forest products such as Brazil nuts, wild rubber and açaí berries, for small-scale farming and for some sustainable timber extraction. Our project is working with the local population to help them continue these forest-friendly practices, through which they can get a good income whilst keeping the forest alive.

Our mission during my trip was to set up a new network of camera traps in order to monitor and identify the local jaguar population.

The jaguar is the third biggest cat in the world (after the tiger and the lion) and is the largest cat in the Americas. As the rainforest’s top predator, they keep populations of other species in check and are therefore an essential part of the web of life in a healthy, balanced forest.

But deforestation for logging and to clear space for cattle ranching is impacting these beautiful animals. It’s isolating their populations – making breeding harder – and depleting the wild prey available to them, which in turn can lead them to hunt livestock and bring them into conflict with farmers, where they’re often killed.

Jaguars are shy and elusive, so camera traps are an important tool for monitoring and identifying the animals roaming the forest.

We check through the equipment we're taking out into the reserve the day before our journey. This includes 72 camera traps plus memory cards and batteries – all funded by our brilliant jaguar adopters!

As we travel out of the city of Rio Branco, the road conditions get increasingly challenging. We drive for four hours through extensive cattle farms that were once Amazon forest. At one point our vehicle gets completely stuck in the mud and we need another car to pull us out. This is starting to feel like a real adventure.

After stopping overnight, we walk the remaining three kilometres into the forest. The road is so muddy it’s clinging to our shoes and making it difficult to walk. But we trudge on, eager to get started. The energy is high and we can’t wait to set our first camera trap.

We attach the camera to a tree at roughly knee-height facing a trail through the forest so it can snap the jaguars as they walk by. We place another camera on the other side of the trail so we can photograph both sides of every jaguar.

The last step is turning the camera on and locking it into place. We’ve split into teams to set up cameras in 35 more sites, camping at a ranch just outside the reserve for 12 days, enduring mosquitoes, rain, heat and high humidity.

The team will return to the cameras in three months to take them down and analyse the images back at our project office in Rio Branco.

I can’t wait to find out what the team discovers. Here’s an image captured from our last expedition in the reserve. Each jaguar is different and photos like this help us identify individuals by the markings on their coats. This helps us understand how many there are in the area, whether the population is healthy and whether we need to take urgent action. The cameras will also give us information about the animals these jaguars are preying on.

We all need the Amazon. It’s part of our planetary life-support system. And jaguars help to keep it healthy and thriving.

At WWF we want to protect more areas of the rainforest and its wildlife, so we’re grateful to Old Mout Cider for helping us continue this work into the future.

Find out more about how we’re fighting for your world with Old Mout.

Protecting the Amazon is just one of the ways we’re working to stop climate devastation:

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