Monitoring of the Saharan cheetah and large fauna in the Ahaggar Cultural Park (southern Algeria) 1 National Center for Prehistoric, Anthropological and Historical Research 3, boulevard Franklin Roosevelt, Algiers, Algeria 2 National Office of the Ahaggar Cultural Park, Tamanrasset, Algeria *Corresponding author ABSTRACT The Ahaggar Cultural Park (Tamanrasset, Algeria) contains an extremely valuable faunal di- versity of which the Cheetah is the flagship element of universal value. This biodiversity, threatened by the combination of climatic and anthropogenic constraints, led the park office to set up a monitoring system based on a holistic approach under the postulate of inseparability “Culture - Nature”. The use of camera traps associated with the traditional ecological knowl- edge of the local population has confirmed the effective presence of 08 wild mammals, 06 of which are protected at the national level and 03 listed in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This work has also provided more information on the behavior of the Acinonyx ju- batus hecki (Schreber, 1775) (Mammalia Felidae), critically endangered species which has not been observed in the Atakor for more than 15 years. INTRODUCTION In the context of a major biological crisis where one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction (IPBES, 2019), the scientific com- munity is increasingly insisting on the urgency of completing taxonomic inventories, which are often fragmented, and carry out diagnostics of ecosys- tems in order to decide on the implementation of conservation programs. Moreover, it is accepted that faunal diversity is a key dimension in maintaining ecological bal- ances, and represents an undeniable concept in a context of global changes. It contributes to the vi- ability and functioning of ecosystems, and to in- creasing their resistance to external disturbances (Franklin et al., 2002). Despite the extreme climatic conditions that pre- vail in Saharan landscapes, many taxa of different biogeographical origins have adapted and/or evolved there through long paleoenvironmental mu- tations, to constitute ecosystems of remarkable phe- notypic and genetic diversity. They form a unique field of investigation for the sciences of biodiversity which nevertheless arouses on a global scale an in- terest qualified as insufficient with regard to the stakes and potentialities of the largest desert in the world (Durant et al., 2012). In the current state, reinvesting and knowing the long-term capacity of these environments to main- tain their multifunctionality, via their different roles, in particular as a refuge for biodiversity, will shed new light on the dynamics and conservation of bio- diversity in extreme situations (Medal, 2013). KEY WORDS Ahaggar; Cheetah; Cultural Park; Fauna; Sahara. Abdenour Moussouni 1* , Réda Behlouli 1 , Salah Amokrane 2 , Wafa Amoura 1 & Abdelkrim Gharriche 2 Biodiversity Journal, 2022,13 (4): 853–863 Received 09.06.2022; accepted 21.11.2022; published online 30.12.2022 https://doi.org/10.31396/Biodiv.Jour.2022.13.4.853.863