accomplishment of walking the Amazon river has been described by Sir Ranulph Fiennes as being "truly extraordinary...in the top league of expeditions past and present". Stafford was announced as one of National Geographic Adventurers of the Year 2010 and then in March 2011 he was awarded European Adventurer of the Year in a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2011 Guinness World Records recognised Stafford's achievement and he appears in the 2012 Guinness Book of Records. Also in 2011, Stafford was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He was not presented the award until 2014 at an event in Perth, Scotland. Commissioned by Discovery Communications, in August 2012 Stafford filmed a three-part special for Discovery Channel where he was dropped on the uninhabited tropical island of Olorua () in the Pacific for 60 days with no food or equipment to help him survive. "Ed Stafford: Naked and Marooned" was aired on Discovery Channel in the UK in March 2013 and "Naked Castaway" (US version) aired in the USA in April of the same year. Stafford's book of the 60 days in isolation was released in the UK (Virgin Books) in June 2014 and was released in the USA (Penguin Books) in September 2014. Stafford appears on Discovery Channel in his self-filmed series Marooned with Ed Stafford that is a joint Europe and US Discovery Channel commission. The series was followed up by Ed Stafford: Into The Unknown, which follows Stafford on his travels to remote locations to investigate strange and inexplicable markings which have baffled scientists. The programme aired on the Discovery Channel UK and its international subsidiaries in the latter part of 2015. The series Ed Stafford: Left For Dead, another survival show, premiered in the autumn of 2017. A survival show Ed Stafford: First Man Out with a competition format began production in 2018, and premiered in early 2019. In the show, Stafford meets one other survival expert each week in a different part of the world where each competes to complete a difficult trek with minimal provisions. Stafford's six competitors in season one are: Aldo Kane, (Borneo, episode one), Khen Rhee (Kazakhstan, episode two), Matt Graham (Mongolia, episode three), EJ Snyder (Thailand, episode four), Cat Bigney (Palau, episode five) and John Hudson (India, episode six). Series two of First Man Out was filmed entirely in China and premiered in early 2020; Stafford's six