The team of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation would like to wish you a happy new year and would like to thank you for your ongoing support!

2017 was an incredible year for us, because we were involved in the creation of two new national parks to save the remaining critically endangered western chimpanzees in their natural habitat.

- The new Moyen-Bafing National Park in Guinea hosts between 4 - 5,000 western chimpanzees in an area of 6,426 sq km, the largest protected area for chimpanzees in Guinea and the largest chimpanzee population in Africa. The new park provides also habitat for several vulnerable large mammal species including the leopard (/Panthera pardus/), the golden cat (/Caracal aurata/), the hippopotamus (/Hippopotamus amphibious/) and near threatened species, such as the bay duiker  (/Cephalophus dorsalis/), the yellow-back duiker (/Cephalophus sylvicultur/) and the Guinean baboon (/Papio papio/).

- The new Grebo-Krahn National Park in Liberia hosts about 300 western chimpanzees  in a primary tropical rainforest of 970 sq km, the heart of the transboundary Taï-Grebo-Sapo Forest Complex between Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia. The new park provides habitat for several threatened large mammal species including the critically endangered western chimpanzee (/Pan troglodytes verus/), the endangered and endemic pygmy hippopotamus (/Choeropsis liberiensis/), Jentink’s duiker (/Cephalophus jentinki/) and western red colobus monkey (/Piliocolobus badius/), as well as the vulnerable forest elephant (/Loxodonta cyclotis/), Zebra duiker (/Cephalophus zebra/) and Diana monkey (/Cercopithecus diana/).

For the new year, we want to support these new protected areas and continue our work in chimpanzee forests in Guinea, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire.