Odzala-Kokoua National Park is a remote and expansive 13,500 km2 protected area in northwestern Republic of Congo. Designated as a national park in 1935, Odzala received biosphere reserve status in 1977, and joined the African Parks network under a 25-year management agreement in 2010. Because the park consists of lowlands at approximately 1 degree of latitude north of the equator, Odzala’s most prevalent landscapes are dense tropical rainforests. However, the park exists at the intersection of many regional scale features and gradients, adding a great deal of landscape complexity to the park. The northern limit of the near continuous savannas extending up from Southern Africa is contained within Odzala, enabling research into the forces that drive the transitions between open and closed canopy ecosystems in the Afrotropics. Within the savannas are so-called forest islands, or small patches of rainforest ecosystem that are highly distinct from the nearby savannas and contiguous forests. There is also an enormous range of vegetative communities within the contiguous forested areas, with the north east corner of the park closely matching the vegetation of the Sangha region of north eastern Congo, and the rest of the park being most similar to the forests of Gabon. Marantaceae forests, an open canopy forest type dominated by understory plants in the arrowroot family, are prevalent in the western and eastern boundaries of Odzala. Closed canopy forests dominate the central and northern regions of Odzala, with a significant amount of variation being determined by localized hydrological conditions. The lower lying riverine areas consist of swamp and gallery forests.
Preliminary data from Davies Lab research suggests that there are also presently undescribed forest types locally along smaller tributaries, highlighting the complex role hydrology plays in the park. Largely associated with Odzala’s hydrology are large nutrient rich clearings called bais, which act as refugia for plant species adapted to these habitats and are also hotspots of animal activity due to hypothesized high concentrations of nutrients. Odzala supports a complete assemblage of Congo rainforest megafauna including African forest elephants, chimpanzees, bongos, and western lowland gorillas. There are also in excess of 4,400 plant species, 440 bird species, 100 mammal species, and a rich diversity of arthropods.
Current projects in Odzala are mostly focused on bais dynamics, including how and why they are so attractive to large animal species, their stability over time and the role megafauna might play in maintaining these features. We have collected several thousand hectares of drone-based LiDAR and RGB data using HALO over the forests, savannas, and bais of Odzala and are working to incorporate these data with ongoing camera trap surveys, elephant GPS telemetry, soil sampling, and tree coring to develop a robust understanding of how these forests and their animals communities persits and function at landscape scales. In addition, we have future projects planned to investigate effects of megafauna on regional Carbon dynamics, the relative expansion and contraction of forest and savanna, and studies on termite diversity and ecology.