Odzala-Kokoua — Landseed

Map key

Odzala-Kokoua National Park

Lossi Gorilla Sanctuary

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

Western lowland gorilla

African forest elephant

Spotted hyena

Bongo

Forest buffalo

Central chimpanzee

Grey parrot

Black colobus

RN 2 & numbered roads

Camp / gateway village

Altitude bands · 351–823 m in the park

Beyond the park850 m +

Watershed crests700–850

Upper slopes600–700

Rolling interfluves500–600

Lower basin420–500

Valley floors350–420

Below the park311–350

Bands are altitude, not vegetation, and are named for landform rather than plants on purpose: Marantaceae forest, closed primary forest and the savanna mosaic each span more than one band here.

Odzala-Kokoua National Park

A blocky 13,382 km² block of the north-west Congo Basin, drained by the Mambili and its tributaries. Its boundary runs some 565 km as digitised — about 1.4 times the 410 km a circle of equal area would need. That makes it an unusually compact park: almost all of its area is interior, and it has far less edge per hectare than a long ribbon reserve.

Area

13,382 km² gazetted

Boundary

~565 km as digitised

Compactness

0.53 Polsby–Popper

First protected

1935

Enlarged

2001 presidential decree

Elevation

360 – 830 m

Biosphere reserve — designated 1977

Managed by African Parks — public-private partnership with the Government of the Republic of the Congo since 2010

Key Biodiversity Area — site 6085, triggered by forest elephant, western gorilla, chimpanzee, grey parrot and eight more

The last spotted hyenas in the Congo Basin live in this park's forest-savanna mosaic; the nearest other population is over 800 km away.

Area, dates and elevation: African Parks and the Key Biodiversity Areas Partnership (site 6085), which agree on 13,382.32 km². Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 5885230. Note: that OSM ring stitches to one closed ring and measures 13,733 km², about 2.6% more than the stated area — so the outline here is indicative rather than cadastral, and every area figure shown comes from the gazetted source, not from the drawn shape. Protected Planet/WDPA 643 reports a different 13,546 km²; that 1.2% spread is recorded in docs/research-record.json rather than reconciled. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring and are scale-dependent (the true boundary is longer).