Chimpanzee "Tree Highways" May Save African Apes

Scientists in Africa have embarked on two ambitious projects to keep dwindling colonies of wild chimpanzees from dying out.

In Guinea, West Africa, just 13 chimpanzees remain in a virtual island of trees near the Bossou village, an Oxford University zoologist told USA Today.

Zoologist Dora Biro explained that the fading colony is just three-and-a-half miles from a mountain range "full of chimpanzees" that could provide a continuous influx of new residents. The problem is, the groups are separated by a wide stretch of savanna that makes the journey too dangerous.

So since 1997, the Japanese biologists who established Bossou as one of the world's six sites for the long-term study of chimps in the wild have been working with Guinean researchers and local villagers to plant a corridor of trees across the savanna. The researchers hope the Green Corridor Project will re-establish the migration between the chimp populations.

"The trees still need to grow before they're at all passable for chimps," Biro told USA Today. "The idea is if this corridor does work, if the trees survive, it will give chimps access both in and out, and that could save the community."

A newer and more ambitious reforestation project is taking place in southern Rwanda, where a group of 15 chimpanzees teeter on the brink of extinction in an isolated pocket of rain forest.

The Rwandan government and the Great Ape Trust in Iowa are two years into a 10-year partnership to create the Rwanda National Conservation Park, a 30-mile tree corridor connecting the Gishwati Forest Reserve, the chimpanzees' home range, to the much larger Nyungwe National Park.

The Gishwati Forest, once the second largest indigenous rain forest in Rwanda with a quarter-million acres, was deforested in part due to cattle ranching in the 1980s, and the resettlement of refugees who cleared the land for subsistence farming after the 1990s civil war/genocide.

Reforesting the area goes well beyond helping chimps. According to the Great Ape Trust, the conservation effort is meant to improve water quality, control floods, promote eco-tourism and boost local employment.

Tags: africa, chimpanzees, chimps, endangered animals, EndangeredAnimals, reforestation