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The Maasai Mara National Reserve (also spelled Masai Mara; known by the locals as The Mara) is a large game reserve in Narok County, Kenya, contiguous with the Serengeti National Park in Mara Region, Tanzania. It is named in honor of the Maasai people (the ancestral inhabitants of the area) and their description of the area when looked at from afar: "Mara", which is Maa (Maasai language) for "spotted," an apt description for the circles of trees, scrub, savanna, and cloud shadows that mark the area.

It is globally famous for its exceptional population of lions, leopards and cheetahs, game, and the annual migration of zebra, Thomson's gazelle, and wildebeest to and from the Serengeti every year from July to October, known as the Great Migration.

The Maasai Mara National Reserve is only a fraction of the Greater Mara Ecosystem, which includes the following Group Ranches: Koiyaki, Lemek, Ol Chorro Oirowua, Olkinyei, Siana, Maji Moto, Naikara, Ol Derkesi, Kerinkani, Oloirien, and Kimintet.

The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is a large feline (family Felidae, subfamily Felinae) inhabiting most of Africa and parts of the Middle East. It is the only extant member of the genus Acinonyx. The cheetah can run faster than any other land animal— as fast as 112 to 120 km/h (70 to 75 mph) in short bursts covering distances up to 500 m (1,600 ft), and has the ability to accelerate from 0 to over 100 km/h (62 mph) in five seconds.

This cat is also notable for modifications in the species' paws. It is one of the few felids with semi-retractable claws.

Fauna of Africa, in its broader sense, is all the animals living on the African continent and its surrounding seas and islands. The more characteristic African fauna is found in the Afrotropical ecoregion - formerly called Ethiopian (the Sub-Saharan Africa). Lying almost entirely within the tropics, and equally to north and south of the equator creates favourable conditions for rich wildlife.

Fauna is all of the animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora. Flora, fauna and other forms of life such as fungi are collectively referred to as biota.

Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess Shale fauna".

Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.

Wildlife traditionally refers to non-domesticated vertebrates, but has come to broadly reference to all wild plants, animals and other organisms . Domesticating wild plant and animal species for human benefit has occurred many times all over the planet, and has a major impact on the environment, both positive and negative.

Wildlife can be found in all ecosystems. Deserts, forests, rain forests, plains, grasslands, other areas including the most developed urban sites, all have distinct forms of wildlife. While the term in popular culture usually refers to animals that are untouched by human factors, most scientists agree that wildlife around is impacted by human activities.

Humans have historically tended to separate civilization from wildlife in a number of ways including the legal, social, and moral sense. Religions have often declared certain animals to be sacred, and in modern times concern for the natural environment has provoked activists to protest the exploitation of wildlife for human benefit or entertainment.

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth". Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord. The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers, and has steadily gained currency ever since. This usage was confirmed during the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.

Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" often refers to geology and wildlife. Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness–wild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, "human nature" or "the whole of nature". This more traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a human mind. Depending on the particular context, the term "natural" might also be distinguished from the unnatural, the supernatural, or synthetic.

In terrestrial zoology, megafauna (Ancient Greek megas "large" + New Latin fauna "animal") are large or giant animals. The most common thresholds used are 45 kilograms (100 lb) or 100 kilograms (220 lb). This thus includes many species not popularly thought of as overly large, such as white-tailed deer and red kangaroo, and even humans.

In practice, the most common usage encountered in academic and popular writing describes land animals roughly larger than a human that are not (solely) domesticated. The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna — the land animals often larger than modern counterparts considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in the Americas and Australia became extinct fairly recently (10,000-40,000 years ago). It is also commonly used for the largest extant wild land animals, especially elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines. Megafauna may be subcategorized by their trophic position into megaherbivores (e.g. elk), megacarnivores (e.g. lions), and more rarely, megaomnivores (e.g. bears).

A Vulnerable species is one which has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as likely to become Endangered unless the circumstances threatening its survival and reproduction improve. There are currently 4728 animals and 4914 plants classified as Vulnerable, compared with 1998 levels of 2815 and 3222, respectively.

Vulnerability is mainly caused by habitat loss or destruction. Vulnerable species are monitored and are becoming threatened. However, some species listed as "vulnerable" may in fact be quite abundant in captivity, examples being the blue poison dart frog.

According to the IUCN they use several criteria to enter species to this Vulnerable category.

A taxon is Vulnerable when it is not Critically Endangered or Endangered but is facing a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium-term future, as defined by any of the following criteria (A to E):

A) Population reduction in the form of either of the following:

1) An observed, estimated, inferred or suspected reduction of at least 20% over the last 10 years or three generations, whichever is the longer, based on (and specifying) any of the following:

a) direct observation

b) an index of abundance appropriate for the taxon

This is a partial list of apex predators—those predators that are not preyed upon as healthy adults in the wild. Full scavengers (e.g. most vultures), although they may not be preyed on either, are not counted as apex predators unless they at least partially depend on capturing live prey. Many species listed here are only Apex predators within certain environments, e.g. coyotes are only apex predators when larger predators such as the Gray Wolf or the Brown Bear are absent.