Algeria

Algeria is the largest country in Africa and close to four fifths of its territory is Sahara. In the north, the Tell and Kabylia keep cork and holm oak woods and cedar forests that descend to the Mediterranean, with the Barbary stag, the only deer native to the African continent, and with Algeria's last Barbary macaques. The interior plateaux are covered by esparto steppe and by chotts, salt lagoons where flamingos and waders spend the winter. Towards the south, the volcanic Hoggar massif and the sandstone plateaux of Tassili n'Ajjer form islands of altitude in the middle of the desert, with microclimates that allow thousand-year-old Saharan cypresses, dorcas gazelles, aoudad and a ghostly population of Saharan cheetah, detected only on camera traps, to survive.