Simandou - Ecology and Natural History

Ecology and Natural History

The Simandou Range is an important area of conservation for the Guinean forest ecosystem of West Africa, one of the world's biologically richest and most endangered terrestrial ecosystems. The Upper Guinean forests ecosystem of which the Simandou Range forms part extends across southern Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and southern Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and western Togo. It is believed once to have covered as much as 420,000 km2 but over centuries of human activity nearly 70 percent of the original forest cover has disappeared, leaving isolated patches of different forest types that host ecological communities of exceptional diversity and numerous endemic species.

The variety of habitats found in the Simandou Range include humid Guinean savanna, Western Guinean lowland forest, Guinean montane and gallery forests, and the rare and endangered West African montane grassland habitat. The Pic de Fon forest at the southern end of the range is a relatively intact area of approximately 25,600 ha. that contains many typical flora and fauna of the Upper Guinean forests ecosystem, including endangered species such as the Nimba otter shrew (Micropotamogale lamottei), the West African chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus), the Diana monkey (Cercopithecus diana diana) and the Sierra Leone Prinia (Schistolais leontica), a bird of the West African highlands known from only three other sites in the world.

The area has so far been protected by relative isolation but its biodiversity is now threatened by the encroachment of agriculture, illegal and unregulated bush meat hunting, logging, uncontrolled bush fires, road development, potentially destructive mining operations and human population growth. Government agencies' lack of capacity to enforce environmental legislation increases the threat. Land tenure conflicts and ecologically destructive subsistence farming practices (slash and burn agriculture), exacerbated by poverty, also pose problems for the environment.