The Congolian forests are a broad belt of lowland tropical moist broadleaf forest which extends across the basin of the Congo River and its tributaries in Central Africa. The Congolian forests cover southeastern Cameroon, eastern Gabon, the northern and central Republic of the Congo, and the northern and central Democratic Republic of the Congo, and portions of southern and southwestern Central African Republic.
To the north and south, the forests transition to drier forest-savanna mosaic, a mosaic of drier forests, savannas, and grasslands. To the west, the Congolian forests transition to the coastal Lower Guinean forests, which extend from western Gabon and Cameroon into southern Nigeria and Benin; these forests zones share many similarities, and are sometimes known as the Lower Guinean-Congolian forests. To the east, the lowland Congolian forests transition to the highland Albertine Rift montane forests, which cover the Mountains lining the Albertine Rift, a branch of the East African Rift system. The Congolian Forests are a global 200 ecoregion.
The forest ecosystems of the Congo basin span across much of Central Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf of Guinea to the mountains of the Albertine Rift in the east. Covering 700,000 square miles in six countries, they constitute the second largest area of contiguous moist tropical forest left in the world and represent approximately one fifth of the world’s remaining closed canopy tropical forest. This vast area hosts a wealth of biodiversity, including over 10,000 species of plants, 1,000 species of birds, and 400 species of mammals, and three of the world’s four species of great apes. It is also home to more than 24 million people, many of which depend on the forest for their livelihoods. The Congo basin forests not only play a critical role for global biodiversity conservation, they also provide vital regional and global ecological services as a carbon sink and catchment basin.
Even though much of the forest area remains intact, the regional forest ecosystems continue to be at risk from a complex set of threats that call for concerted global action: unsustainable timber and mineral extraction, bush meat trade for urban and commercial forestry settlement markets, land clearing for agriculture, and weak governance.
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