KORUP NATIONAL PARK
By David Oken, staff biologist at Korup National Park.
(Additional reporting by The Frontier Telegraph staff)

Korup National Park is one of the oldest and most biologically diverse areas of lowland rainforest in Africa, rich in animals, plants, and fungi. Designated as a National Park in 1986, Korup lies on the western border of Cameroon’s Southwest Province, some 50 km inland from the Bight of Biafra, and comprises an area of some 1260 square kilometers. Average rainfall within the park is over 5000mm per year; the average temperature is 27ºC with an average humidity 86%.

In addition to lowland rainforest, the mid-Korup region includes areas of swamp forest, a small area of secondary forest around the village of Ekundu Kundu, and sub-montane forest associated with Mount Juahan, which is the highest point in the Park. Sub-montane forest is of particularly high conservation value in the Wet Tropics of Africa as it is of limited extent and typically contains a significant number of sub-montane endemic plants.

In 1996, at the invitation of the Korup National Park Project management, RBG Kew in conjunction with Earthwatch Europe and the National Herbarium of Cameroon undertook botanical and mycological inventory work in the mid-Korup region.

Previous plant and fungus collections had been made in the area, chiefly by Duncan Thomas, who produced a Korup Project Plant List (Thomas, 1993), and Roy Watling of RBG Edinburgh, who published a list of non-agaricoid macro fungi (Hjortstam et al., 1993). 

In the introduction to the plant list, however, Thomas readily acknowledged it was "by no means complete" and that the field coverage was "very patchy" The same was even truer of the fungi.

Phyllobotryum soyaxianum (Flacourtiaceae). Monopodial shrubs remarkable for bearing flowers and fruits along the midribs of the leaves.

Of the twelve 25 x 25 m plots, ten were situated along transects in lowland rainforest at altitudes between 170–550 m, an eleventh plot was situated in freshwater swamp forest (alt 150 m) and the twelfth plot was on Mount Juahan (alt ca. 1100 m).

Understorey of lowland evergreen forest, Korup National Park. 25m x 25m plots in Korup produced the highest in our Cameroon series, over 300 vascular plant species per plot

New Discoveries

The preliminary results of the mid-Korup vascular plant inventory work were reported at a workshop on the Korup National Park and Project Area (Cheek & Cable, 1998). In total, approximately 832 fertile plant collections were made with a further 3150 (mostly) sterile plot collections. A new genus, Korupodendron, and several new plant species were discovered amongst the plant collections and a manual of the legumes of mid-Korup was subsequently published by Kew (Mackinder, 1998). Three initial papers on the fungi (Roberts 1999; 2000; 2001) have described one genus and sixteen species new to science.

“The park is also known for containing the plant Ancistrocladus korupensis (Ancistrocladaceae), also found in the adjoining Oban National Park in Nigeria. It was one of the two plants identified by the US National Cancer Institute against HIV that causes AIDS. If the early promise actually translates into real medicinal value, then the plant could provide a source for villagers in the area as well as make a great contribution towards world health,” reports the Oracle Education Foundation’s thinkquest.com.

In its“Living in Africa” series, thinkquest.com adds that “The Korup National Park is the largest and most famous project undertaken by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The project is actually a joint venture of the Government of Cameroon, ODA, GTZ, EU and WWF-UK. Its purpose is to protect and maintain the park as well as integrating it into regional development plans. The WWF project covers an area of 4,500 square kilometers including the Korup National Park, forest reserves of Nta-Ali, Rumpi Hills, Ejagham and buffer zones for agriculture, watershed protection and hunting. Today, boundaries have been clearly defined; nature trails created with surveillance posts and camp sites built and credible anti-poaching methods have been undertaken. The project also includes sub-programs that combine park development and management with environmental education and training. For centuries, the lives of the people in the Korup area have been related to forests. There are 29 villages in the area, 6 of them inside the park.”