Lawachara

Lawachara National Park was established in 1996 in Moulvibazar district, in north-eastern Bangladesh, and at barely 12 km² it is one of the smallest protected areas in the country.

It protects a fragment of tropical semi-evergreen hill forest, an ecosystem that in Bangladesh has been reduced to minimal remnants by demographic pressure, among the highest in the world. Much of the present stand comes from plantations made by the British forest administration from the mid-nineteenth century onwards on previously felled forest, mixed with patches of native vegetation.

Its emblematic species is the western hoolock gibbon, the only ape in Bangladesh and one of the most threatened primates in Asia, of which a very small population of family groups survives in the park, their morning song the characteristic sound of the place. The fragmentation of the forest, crossed by a road and a railway, is its main problem: gibbons are strictly arboreal and do not cross clearings, which isolates the groups. The park is also home to spectacled langur, macaques, hornbills and a rich herpetofauna, and it is managed with the participation of the Khasi communities living inside it.