Gambella

Gambella National Park was established in 1974 in western Ethiopia, next to the border with South Sudan, and at some 5,061 km² it is the largest in the country.

Its landscape does not match the usual image of Ethiopia: it consists of low, hot floodplains, wetlands, palm savannah and riverine forest in the basin of the Baro and the Akobo, tributaries of the White Nile, an environment that belongs biogeographically to the Sudan and not to the Ethiopian highlands.

Its main value is a migration: hundreds of thousands of white-eared kob, along with tiang and Mongalla gazelle, move seasonally between the Gambella plains and Boma National Park in South Sudan, following the flooding cycle. Aerial surveys carried out from 2007 onwards revealed that this is one of the largest terrestrial mammal migrations on the planet, comparable to that of the Serengeti and until then unknown to science. The park faces serious threats: large-scale agricultural concessions around it, population displacement and management severely limited by the instability of the border region.