4910 km²
Lowland rain forest with savanna and gallery forest in the north. Ogooué river.
• Lowland rain forest with
savanna and gallery forest in the north.
• Ogooué River.
Mammals (63 species)- Forest elephant*, western lowland gorilla*, chimpanzee*, mandrill*, forest buffalo, sun-tailed guenon*, leopard, black colobus, sitatunga*, yellow-backed duiker
Birds (399 species) - Dja River warbler, rosy bee-eater, crowned hawk eagle, great blue turaco, grey-necked rock fowl*, chocolate backed kingfisher, emerald cuckoo, black guineafowl.
* IUCN red-listed.
Since 1985.
Gabon National Parks Office, Gabon Ministry of Water and Forests, International Center for Medical Research (CIRMF), RAPAC.
No other rainforest site has so high an
elephant biomass within a protected area large enough to maintain
genetic diversity.
Name : Bryan Curran
Title : WCS Gabon Projects Director
Email :
bcurran[AT SIGN]wcs[DOT]org
Address :
Wildlife Conservation Society,
BP 7847,
Libreville,
Gabon.
For more information, see www.wcs.org/africa
Wildlife Conservation Society International
Conservation,
Africa Program,
2300 Southern Blvd.,
Bronx, NY 10460, USA
The Wildlife Conservation Society's International Conservation program saves wildlife and wild lands by understanding and resolving critical problems that threaten key species and large, wild ecosystems around the world.
• Site-based conservation
• Research
• Training and capacity-building
• New model development
• Informing policy
• Linking zoo-based and field-based conservation
Contributions to this project can be sent to the WCS Africa Program in NY (address above)
Forest-savannah interface, Lopé National Park ©Lee
White
Lope National Park, located in the center of Gabon, was the first protected area in Gabon when the Lopé-Okanda Wildlife Reserve was created in 1946. Its legal and management statutes have changed several times over the years, and the Lope National Park became part of the network of 13 Parks created in August 2002 by Presidential decree.
Although mostly rainforest, in the north the Park contains the last remnants of grass savannas created in Central Africa during the last Ice Age, 15,000 years ago. These savannas are now a rare ‘island’ habitat in the rainforests and thus the Park preserves a unique record of biological evolution during that time.
The Lopé area has been inhabited almost continuously from 400,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherer settlements left the oldest concentration of archaeological relics in west-central Africa. Between 2500 and 1400 BP iron-working cultures burnt and felled the forest and carved some 1200 petroglyphs. The ancestors of today’s inhabitants arrived around 700 years ago. They cleared forest for plantations of fruits and manioc as villages do today.
The Ogooué River flowing through the North of the Park has always been a major trade route across Gabon. Despite the designation of the Reserve, a road was built in the 1960’s, through the northern edge of the Park and the area was opened to forestry in the 1980’s by a railway. Villages spread through the forests of the Park at the turn of the century, but have gradually migrated north to benefit from the economic possibilities of the river, road and railway. Many rural villages have completely vanished, as Gabon’s population has urbanized in recent years. In 2005, the population living around the Park is around 3500 inhabitants in six villages on the northern and eastern boundaries of the Park. No villages were within the Park when it was created, but some Bongo ‘pygmy’ groups still hunt and gather in south of the Park.
The main threats are unsustainable hunting and ivory poaching, as well as commercial logging adjacent to the Park. An indirect threat is under-resourced government involvement in Park protection.
Rock engravings near Lope National Park ©Richard Oslisly