The Dzanga-Sanga Rain Forest

The Dzanga-Sanga Rain Forest
By Sonal Panse
Published: 3/13/2004
Buzzle.com

The Dzanga-Sanga Forest

The Western and Central parts of the African Continent once abounded with dense Rain Forests. The European adventurers and novelists of the nineteenth century were very much attracted by the mysterious aspects of these places and in their accounts there are varying descriptions of impenetrable forests, with greenish light filtering in through towering trees and the deep hush broken by the high-pitched calling of birds and monkeys and the occasional roar of carnivores; the Tarzan books, to mention an example, have just such a setting, although, of course their author Edgar Rice Burroughs never saw the shores of Africa. For a long time nothing was known about the forest interiors and even today there is still much unexplored and undiscovered by the scientists. However, since logging was allowed in the 1970s and logging roads built to facilitate the industry, the forests have been laid open to human exploitation and have drastically suffered.

One of the few still intact ones lie in the Congolese River Basin in the southern-western region of the Central African Republic, a country set in the heart of Africa and hemmed in by Cameroon, Chad, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), and the Republic of Congo. The Dzanga-Sanga Rain Forest, as it is known, is now a protected Reserve stretching across 3,159 sq. km. and is exceptional for its rich biodiversity. Biodiversity means the wide variety of living things and their interlinking relationships with one another and with the environment. It is this that manages the life-sustaining balance on earth. The Dzanga-Sanga greatly intrigues scientists as it may help them to understand how life evolved and diversified. Some of the world's most spectacular and endangered wildlife species are found here. These include the Forest Elephants and Lowland Gorillas, as well as other species like Chimpanzees, Bongos, a wide variety of birds, insects, and microorganisms like fungi and bacteria. Many of these species are endemic to the Dzanga-Sanga, that is, only found in this particular area.

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