The Karanambu Trust

Karanambu Trust Staff

The Karanambu Trust depends on the support of volunteers including board members and staff at Karanambu. We currently have two staff positions each requiring at least a year-long commitment: Project Coordinator and Conservation Biologist.

Salvador de Caires, Karanambu Trust Project Coordinator

Salvador and his wife Andrea (both are managers of Karanambu Lodge) with Diane.

Salvador was born and raised in Georgetown, Guyana. For many years, he raised bougainvillea, hibiscus, orchids, and anthurian lilies, and participated in the Georgetown Flower Show Competition. After completing his education at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Derbyshire, England, he spent 18 months studying and traveling in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Columbia before returning to Guyana to teach English, history, and geography at St. John’s College in Georgetown. He then moved to Wauna in the Northwest District where he grew peanuts, avocados, black-eyed peas and 20 varieties of coconuts on a 28-acre organic farm. He was Chairman of the Wauna Village Council and helped to set up the Nursery school program in partnership with Vanda Radzik. In 1983, Salvador moved to the United States where he worked in the fashion industry in New York City, first as Production Manager for Ambidextrous, Inc, and then as the International Export Manager for Hi Fashion Fabrics.

In the meantime, Salvador continued to follow his passion for garden design by working with the Brooklyn Community Garden Projects from 1983-1999. In 2000, he co-founded the Dirt Diggers, Inc., a Montclair, New Jersey based garden group responsible for award winning gardens for 10 consecutive years. In 2004, after completing studies in Landscape Design at the New York Botanical Gardens, Salvador founded Plantscaping, LLC. In 2009, Salvador and his wife Andrea formed a management company, GREENHEART.elements LLC. Beginning in August 2010, the couple are General Managers of the Karanambu Lodge Inc. located in the North Rupununi region of Guyana.

Evi Paemelaere, PhD, Resident Conservation Biologist Karanambu Trust and Panthera.org grantee

Dr. Evi Paemelaere is a biologist who believes that conservation should be based on solid science, a philosophy that has led her to gain broad experience ranging from cellular and microbiology to evolution, tropical ecology and conservation. She added GIS, R (statistics). resource policy analysis and conflict resolution to this list in order to focus on human-wildlife conflicts.

Born and raised in Belgium, she obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology from the Catholic University of Leuven (2001) and specialized in organisms and populations through a Master’s at the University of Antwerp (2003). Her multi-lingual background, allowed her to expand her education abroad. For her Ph.D.(2010), she moved to Auburn University, Alabama. Research has taken her to Tanzania, where she studied the spread of rodent-borne diseases in Morogoro, and to Costa Rica, where she started to unravel the evolution of a poorly understood trait in anoline lizards. Her findings on anoles are currently being published. In addition, she published a comprehensive study on the evolution of carnivore life history, and co-authored two pieces to the Encyclopedia of Alabama on mammals and threatened species.

During her graduate program at Auburn University, she taught cell biology laboratories and worked as a research technician in projects focusing on West-Nile virus and MRCA. In 2006, she was accepted to the prestigious Tropical Ecology course of the Organization for Tropical Studies. To continue building her experience in conservation, she co-founded a chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) and initiated a school mascot based conservation outreach and education program called Tigers4Tigers. These contributions earned her a Ph.D. award from Auburn University (2010) and a Graduate Teaching Award (2009) from the department of Biological Sciences. She remains active as a committee member of SCB. In her spare time, she enjoys music, dance, exercise, night hikes in search of elusive creatures, and backpacking, especially in Latin America.

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Karanambu Trust Staff