Natural Environment
The floodplain is in the Zambezian flooded grasslands ecoregion, and is bordered by slightly higher sandy ground on which grow dry grasslands (Western Zambezian grasslands) with woodland savanna (Zambezian Baikiaea woodlands) to the east and south, and patches of evergreen forest (Cryptosepalum dry forests) in the north and east.
The flood provides aquatic habitats for fish such as tigerfish and bream, crocodiles, hippopotamus, waterbirds, fish-eating birds, and lechwe, the wading antelope. After the flood, the plain is a habitat for grazing animals such as wildebeest, zebra, tsessebe and small antelope such oribi and steenbok, and their predators. These herbivores have been displaced in most areas by the cattle grazed by the Lozi, but they have provided a large game reserve on the dry grassland to the west, the Liuwa Plain National Park, once the Litunga's hunting grounds, established as a game reserve by Lewanika in the 19th century. In addition the entire western of the Zambezi within the country is a Game Management Area.
Read more about this topic: Barotse Floodplain
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or environment:
“Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart’s drama and the negative meaning of history.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)