- Conservationists working with the official national parks agency in Côte d’Ivoire are planning to create an ecological corridor linking Taï National Park with Grebo National Park in neighboring Liberia.
- The corridor has support from the Ivorian village of Nigré, where residents will grow native trees alongside their crops to facilitate animal movements.
- Animals that will likely benefit include the bongo; like other antelopes in Taï, they are believed to play a key role in helping to disperse seeds to ensure forest regeneration.
- Stitching together the surviving parts of West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest could help ensure this ecosystem and its inhabitants thrive.
NIGRE, Côte d’Ivoire — The village of Nigré in southwestern Côte d’Ivoire sits — like much of this part of West Africa — in a landscape of rice and cassava fields, oil palm plantations and stands of rubber trees that have replaced the forests that once clothed the landscape. Chief Djahi Bertin and his attendants offer a traditional welcome to a group of scientists, conservationists and park rangers in an open-sided building in the chief’s yard.
The guests are served slices of radish-red kola nut, together with a teaspoon of ginger-colored spices, and a choice of wine, beer, spirits or soda.
Bertin takes a glass of wine, half full, and empties it on the concrete floor. The splash resembles the palm of a hand, fingers splayed out. Both the palm and the digits form a unified whole, he says. “We are of one mind.”
The village is not far from the western edge of Taï Forest. At 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles), it’s the largest intact remnant of Upper Guinean Rainforest, which once stretched east from Liberia, across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, to Togo. During a two-day road trip from the commercial hub of Abidjan to Taï, Mongabay witnessed the extent to which the rainforest has been lost in Côte d’Ivoire, estimated to be around 90% over the last century.
The scientists and conservationists visiting Nigré’s chief include representatives from a local NGO, Eburny Biodiversity Conservation (EBURCO), and South Africa-based Leadership for Conservation in Africa (LCA).
They and the Ivorian Office of Parks and Reserves (OIPR) are collaborating on ways to protect Taï: Supporting the work of rangers; promoting biodiversity monitoring; conducting genetic research via a soon-to-be-established laboratory at the Université Nangui Abrogoua in Abidjan; and promoting adventure tourism.
They’re also keen to get Nigré’s support to establish an ecological corridor to link Taï with Grebo National Park in neighboring Liberia, which Bertin points out is only 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) away from Nigré.
“They [animals] are free to move between the two areas,” he says.
This would entail planting rainforest trees on small portions of people’s farms — with their permission — to create a patchwork of forest and fields that could allow the passage of animals, especially forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) and western bongos (Tragelaphus eurycerus). The latter are large brown forest antelopes patterned with white stripes. They’re rarely seen, but their images were recently caught on camera traps set up by OIPR and its partners to monitor mammals within Taï.
Michele Menegon, director of biodiversity conservation with LCA, says a similar reforestation strategy is envisaged for Nigré to the one he helps run on the other side of the continent, in the Nguru mountains of Tanzania. There, villagers apportion a small section of their farms to grow native evergreen trees in return for annual payments from the carbon credit market and donors.
“The idea is to do a very similar thing [in Nigré], including the agroforestry component, to rely less on traditional crops like rubber and have a more diverse landscape comprising multiple crops and not just a monoculture,” he says.
Christine Kouman, an Ivorian environmental scientist and president of EBURCO, has conducted social studies in the populated corridor that separates Taï National Park from neighboring Liberia. She says Nigré and the nearby village of Youkou are two places where residents have expressed interest in being involved in pilot reforestation projects.
Nigré, in particular, has a long history of conservation, a community forest reserve and a chief who can influence his people.
“They are willing to make change,” she says. “This is one of the strengths of Nigré; the chief is really involved in conservation action.”
In return for participating in a reforestation project, community members would hope to see complementary projects — like poultry, fish and pigs — created to support local livelihoods, the chief tells Mongabay.
“If they have these kinds of [farming] activities, it will allow people to stay out of the forest and not go there to hunt,” Bertin says.
Keeping animals safe, especially Taï’s diverse range of ungulates, or hoofed animals, is critical to the forest’s health. Taï harbors at least 14 different ungulate species. In addition to the bongo these include seven species of duikers; the royal antelope (Neotragus pygmaeus) — the world’s smallest — and the red river hog (Potamochoerus porcus), notable for tufted ears that stick out horizontally like those of Yoda the Jedi master in the Star Wars trilogy.
Many ungulates are, however, illegally targeted by hunters to supply demand for bush meat, depriving the rainforest of an important means of seed dispersal.
Bongos, for instance, eat fruit as part of a wider diet of leaves, shoots, grasses and forest plants, experts have told Mongabay. As they move through dense forest, feeding, trampling vegetation and depositing dung, bongos help shape the forest around them. They may help move seeds from place to place — complementing the work of birds, chimpanzees and monkeys.
“Taï and neighboring Liberia’s Grebo and Sapo National Parks are strongholds for the West African lowland species of bongo,” says conservation biologist Tommy Sandri, coordinator for the Bongo Initiative, part of the Africa Field Program at the Chester Zoo in the U.K.
“Connecting these two areas would greatly help for the long term because it would mean more space for the bongos to live,” says Sandri, who was part of the team that visited Taï and was present at the ceremony in Nigré.
Sandri’s Ph.D. focused on mountain bongos (Tragelaphus eurycerus ssp. isaaci) in Kenya, where there are two small isolated populations in the Aberdare mountains and in the Rift Valley’s Mau forest. Being disconnected, those bongos will ultimately require human intervention to keep them in contact.
“Here, in West Africa,” he says, “the human intervention [being considered] is the building of the corridor and then [the bongos] should do it for themselves, as they have always done, for millennia.”
When Koné Sindou, OIPR captain in charge of the northern section of Taï, started working in this sector of the park in 2010, hunters illegally targeting bongos were the easiest to nab. The quantity of flesh on each animal meant the hunters had to build fires to dry and preserve it, creating smoke that betrayed the location of their camps. Hunters are now wise to that; they target smaller antelope and monkeys.
There are promising signs some of them are giving up on hunting in the national park altogether in the face of persistent policing, Sindou says, citing two recent cases in which hunters voluntarily surrendered their weapons. “People are still poaching, but at very low levels,” he says.
OIPR and its NGO partners are also about to launch a project of camera trap monitoring across four large sections of Taï, Menegon with LCA says. The traps should provide vital information on animal presence and movements, as well as illegal activities, which he says will help to guide rangers on where and when to patrol.
Toward the end of the ceremony in Nigré, the chief brings out a different kind of nut — this time small brown oblong ones from the bitter kola plant (Garcinia kola) that is native to West Africa. They are also a valuable cash crop. An assistant slices up the nuts for the guests to taste.
Ideally, farmers in Nigré need seedlings for crops that mature faster than the bitter kola; ones like black pepper. They can produce a harvest and a return over a shorter period, Bertin says. The chief is upbeat about collaborating on an ecological corridor, tracing Nigré’s involvement in conservation back to the early 1990s.
“It’s what we are [still] doing now,” he says.
Banner image: Leopard (Panthera pardus) in Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire in 2026. Image courtesy of OIPR/EBURCO.
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Cite this article
Ryan Truscott (2026). The quest to reconnect imperiled rainforest in West Africa. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-321165Credits
