Biodiversity
The Bateke Plateau Forest Savanna is a unique landscape for central Africa. Dominated by a giant ancient sand dune system, the land is covered by large grass and wooded savanna patches separated by fine lines of dense gallery forest, and several turquoise blue river valleys.
The Bateke Plateau offers spectacular vistas with huge sandstone outcrops, and is home to an interesting biodiversity found nowhere else in the Congo Basin. Unique variants of species such as the lion (Panthera leo) (although thought to have been extirpated in the past two decades), Grimm's duiker (Sylvicapra grimmia), the side striped jackal (Canis adustus), and the Denham's bustard (Neotis denhami) are but a few of the landscape's faunal particularities. A new species of bird, the Téké cisticola (Cisticola sp. nov.) has recently been confirmed in the Gabon portion of the Plateau. The gallery forests retain a rich compliment of Congo Basin species, including typical forest dwellers such as elephant, buffalo, bushpigs, duikers, chimpanzees and several monkey species.
During 2005 biological and socio-economic surveys were conducted in the Bambama-Lekana site in Congo which demonstrated the presence of elephant, buffalo, bushpig, bushbuck, chimpanzee, and hippo sign in the northern gallery forests and in the southern forest zone of the study area. Two independent sightings of a large carnivore footprint thought to be lion have led to the initiate of directed lion surveys to confirm the presence of the cats in the region and design a conservation intervention strategy.