Saadani National Park

The park occupies c. 700 km² of humid savanna along the coast of Tanzania. Annual precipitation is about 1000 mm with two rainy periods. The original vegetation was probably evergreen coastal forests but these were mostly replaced by savanna vegetation in quaternary times, with only Zaraninge and some smaller patches of original forest remaining.

The area consists of three sections with different recent land-use histories. Mkwaja North (240 km²) was a cattle ranch from 1953 to 2000, and Mkwaja South (222 km²) from 1954 to 1987. Saadani (209 km²) was a game reserve since 1969 and parts of it were previously used for sisal plantations.

At its peak, Mkwaja Ranch was stocked with 13,000 cattle. The whole area was organised into 18 paddock systems where up to 1500 cows were herded for the night. After the ranch was abandoned herbivore numbers were unprecedentedly low, and up to now, even the grasslands of the paddocks, dominated by palatable species such as Cynodon dactylon, are largely unused, except by relatively small populations of Bohor reedbuck, waterbuck and warthog.

Saadani contains higher numbers and diversity of herbivores, such as elephant, giraffe, buffalo, eland, Lichtensteins hartebeest (kongoni), waterbuck, Bohor reedbuck, warthog, Harvey’s and Grey duiker, suni, and small numbers of greater kudu and sable antilope. The area also contains zebra and wildebeest, two species which are not native to the humid coastal region, and were released from a small zoo in the mid 1970’s. Particularly the wildebeest population has grown considerably, and these animals together with other large herbivores have maintained patches of open plains-like vegetation. These patches are in marked contrast to the surrounding vegetation of tall grasses and Acacia or other trees.