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

Sitatunga

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

Altitude, not vegetation. These bands 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 13,546 km² block of the north-west Congo Basin, drained by the Mambili and its tributaries. Its boundary runs some 565 km as digitised — about 1.37 times the 413 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

13,546 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; the park itself dates to 1935, one of Africa's oldest

Managed under a public-private partnership with the Republic of the Congo's Ministry of Forest Economy, Sustainable Development and Environment since November 2010; reaffirmed in 2020, when the 35 km² Lossi Gorilla Sanctuary was incorporated

Important Bird Area (BirdLife International) — over 440 bird species; around 100 mammal species

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

A triennial park survey in 2022 reported forest elephant and western lowland gorilla populations stable and growing, and included the first systematic forest transect survey of Lossi since 2006.

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 are the park manager's own published figures, corroborated by Protected Planet/WDPA 643, which reports the same 13,546 km². Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 5885230. Note: that OSM ring stitches to one closed ring and measures 13,733 km², about 1.4% 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. The Key Biodiversity Areas Partnership factsheet for site 6085 gives a different 13,382.32 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).