These elephants have been invading farms. These are personal farms. So the people are really suffering,” Leonard Akam told Mongabay over the phone. Akam is the head of Boje, one of the largest communities near the reserve. “The destruction an elephant can cause in a day is more than the job of three people. It is just like a bulldozer paving a path.”
This increase in human-wildlife conflict comes as habitat in the Afi River reserve and other nearby protected areas is disappearing
The region’s most iconic resident is arguably the Cross River gorilla, Africa’s most endangered ape. However, it is not clear whether the gorillas permanently reside in Afi River Forest Reserve or merely stray in at intervals. Regardless, the reserve is an important corridor that connects fragments of habitat that sustain the estimated 300-or-so surviving gorillas that live along the border between Nigeria and Cameroon.
Gorillas are known to inhabit three key protected areas in Cross River: Mbe Mountains Community Forest, Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and Cross River National Park. Afi River Forest Reserve joins these areas together, allowing what would be disjunct populations to interbreed.
Research suggests that, because there are so few gorillas left, failure to maintain connectivity between these fragmented populations would severely impede the exchange of genetic material, without which the subspecies would decline.
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