Classroom lesson · Wildlife · 🇨🇮 Ivory Coast

Comoé National Park

Côte d'Ivoire's wild savannah landscape

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Comoé National Park is the largest protected area in West Africa and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Unlike the thick rainforest of Taï, Comoé is a mix of savannah grasslands, gallery forests along rivers, and open plains. The Comoé River winds through the park giving animals a place to drink all year round.

Tell me more

The park is in the north-east of Côte d'Ivoire and covers over 11,000 square kilometres – an area bigger than the entire country of Lebanon. Because the park sits where the dry savannah meets the wetter rainforest zone, it contains an unusually wide mix of plants and animals from both types of habitat.

Hippos wallow in the Comoé River, lions and leopards roam the grasslands, and elephants move between watering holes. Over 500 species of birds have been recorded here, making Comoé one of the best birdwatching locations in West Africa.

UNESCO listed Comoé as a World Heritage Site because it is the only place in the world where certain rainforest plants grow naturally in a savannah setting. Scientists think this happens because the river valley creates a cool, moist corridor through the dry landscape, allowing forest plants to survive far from the main rainforest.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Comoé has grasslands and forests in the same park. What advantages might an animal have if it could move between both?
  2. 02Why is a river so important for animals living on a dry savannah?
  3. 03Some plants in Comoé grow in places where scientists did not expect to find them. What does that teach us about nature?
Try this

Classroom activity

Create a simple food web for the savannah. Start with grass, add a grazing animal (such as a buffalo), add a predator (such as a lion), and then add a decomposer. Draw arrows to show which way energy flows and explain what would happen if one link in the chain disappeared.