Qualla: Mbam Djerem National Park

Mbam Djerem National Park: Introduction

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When survey teams entered Mbam Djerem for the first time in March 2000, they carried maps printed in 1976 from aerial photographs taken in the 1950s and 1960s. The maps showed bush savannah in the park's interior. What the team found instead was shady woodland -- dense stands of Xylopia aethiopica trees, all roughly the same age, with dying savannah bushes mixed in among them and almost no grass on the forest floor. The forest had been quietly advancing into the grassland for decades, and the maps had not kept up. It was the first sign that Mbam Djerem was not just another protected area but a place where the boundary between two of Africa's great biomes was actively shifting underfoot.

Mbam Djerem National Park: Where Two Worlds Collide

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Established in January 2000, Mbam Djerem National Park covers 4,200 square kilometers in the center of Cameroon. Roughly half is lowland tropical forest. The other half is Sudano-Guinean tree and woodland savannah. Between them runs a broad ecotone belt -- part of the Northern Co...

Mbam Djerem National Park: The River That Becomes the Sanaga

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park's main artery is the Djerem River, which is navigable throughout its length within the park and eventually becomes the Sanaga -- Cameroon's longest river -- further south. The Djerem connects the open savannahs of the north to the dense forest of the interior, and it is ...

Mbam Djerem National Park: Baboons and Chimpanzees, Meters Apart

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ecotone creates biological collisions found almost nowhere else. Olive baboons, a savannah species, forage literally within meters of crested mona monkeys, creatures of the deep forest. All three African pig species -- red river hog, common warthog, and giant forest hog -- sh...

Mbam Djerem National Park: A Park the Maps Could Not Predict

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Older residents of villages west of the park remember the interior as grassland and bush forty years ago. The closed-canopy forest that survey teams found in its place tells a story of long-term ecological change -- the forests of Central Africa expand and contract on cycles link...