Minkébé — Landseed

Map key

Indicative range from habitat rules — not sightings

Minkébé National Park

Adjacent reserves

In the crosshairs of traffickingtap a species ↗

Forest elephant

Giant pangolin

African grey parrot

What the intact forest holds

Western lowland gorilla

Central chimpanzee

Mandrill

Lowland bongo

Sitatunga

Forest buffalo

Leopard

Dwarf crocodile

Regional roads (none inside the park)

Human settlement · 2020

People per 100 m cell

scatteredtown

Minkébé National Parkno settlements

The population raster is WorldPop 2020 (constrained, 100 m); it records no settled pixels inside the protected area, and WWF likewise reports no permanent human settlements in the park. The settled ground in frame follows the road corridors — Cameroon's Sangmélima–Djoum–Mintom axis north of the border, Gabon's Minvoul and Makokou roads west and south.

Altitude bands · 476–913 m measured in the park

Inselberg domes & summit ridges620–913

Hill forest560–620

Lowland plateau forest520–560

River corridors & swamp forest476–520

Bands are altitude, not vegetation: rainforest covers every band here, and the frame's highest ground (Mont Bengoué, 1,070 m) lies outside the park.

Live · forest condition

Active fire—24h

Deforestation—30d

NASA FIRMS · Integrated Deforestation Alerts: UMD/GLAD and WUR, via Global Nature Watch (formerly Global Forest Watch), CC BY 4.0 · powered by Resource Watch

Minkébé National Park

A 7,570 km² block of roadless rainforest whose northern edge is an international border — the Ayina River, with Cameroon on the far bank. The outline wraps around a finger of buffer zone in the interior: the old gold-mining enclave between the Sing and Nouna rivers.

Area

7,570 km² Poulsen et al. 2017

Boundary

701 km as digitised

Compactness

0.19 Polsby–Popper

Established

2002

Elevation

476 – 913 m measured on our DEM

One of the 13 parks of 2002 — the decree wave that put ~11% of Gabon under national-park protection in a single act

UNESCO Tentative List — nominated 2003 as “Ecosystème et paysage culturel pygmée du massif de Minkébé” (ref. 1806); not yet inscribed

TRIDOM anchor — the Gabonese corner of the 191,541 km² Dja–Odzala–Minkébé tri-national landscape agreed at Brazzaville, 2005

No roads and no permanent settlements inside the park — the nearest national road is Cameroon's, 6.1 km from the boundary

Why this park matters beyond Gabon

The forest elephant's last great refuge. In 2004 Minkébé held roughly a tenth of all forest elephants on Earth. Between 2004 and 2014 cross-border poaching removed 78–81% of them — more than 25,000 animals (Poulsen et al. 2017). Gabon as a whole still carries ~95,000, the world's largest population, which is why what happens on this border matters to the species everywhere.

An intactness benchmark. The park sits in a ~32,000 km² roadless forest block with no permanent settlement — the condition most of the Congo Basin has already lost. Its wildlife carries the signature of that intactness: gorilla, chimpanzee, mandrill, forest elephant, giant pangolin and the African grey parrot are all present here — the roster this site maps is chosen editorially, to span that story.

A one-park record of every Congo Basin pressure. Ebola emptied its apes in the 1990s (~98% decline in nest encounter rates); a gold rush filled its interior with thousands of miners until the 2011 evacuation; and the ivory trade emptied its elephants through the 2000s. What survives here is the measure of what protection on paper can and cannot hold.

A transboundary test case. The poaching that emptied Minkébé was staged from another country. No fence, patrol or park boundary answers that alone — which is what the TRIDOM agreement, and every cross-border conservation effort in the Congo Basin, exists to solve.

Area: 7,570 km², the figure published by Poulsen et al. 2017 (Current Biology 27:R134–R135); establishment and management: ANPN, Republic of Gabon. No ANPN-published area figure was reachable for this build, so a peer-reviewed one is stated and the full published spread is recorded in docs/research-record.json. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 3348039 — a ring traced from a published parks-system map, measuring 7,617.5 km², about 0.6% over the stated area; the outline is indicative rather than cadastral, and every area figure shown comes from the literature, not the drawn shape. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring at roughly 1 km generalisation and are therefore scale-dependent. Elevation is our own measurement, not a cited figure: the baked z11 terrain raster (AWS Terrain Tiles) clipped to that same OSM ring spans 476–913 m, and that is the range the page states. A smoothed DEM underreads narrow granite domes, so the modelled maximum is a floor, not a summit height. Elephant figures: Poulsen et al. 2017, Current Biology 27:R134–R135; national estimate: Laguardia et al. 2021.

Imagery: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022–2025) · Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles · Boundaries & water: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · Population: WorldPop 2020 constrained (CC BY 4.0), built on building footprints — Source of building footprints: Ecopia Vector Maps Powered by Maxar Satellite Imagery © 2020 · Elevation ranges measured by Landseed on the baked DEM, clipped to the OSM boundary ring · An independent visualization by Landseed PBC. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for ANPN Gabon.