Wamba is a village in the

Luo Scientific Reserve The Luo Scientific Reserve () is a protected area situated in the Ikela territory of Tshuapa province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The reserve covers . The reserve is in the territory of the Bongando people. A Japanese team first started ...

Tshuapa Tshuapa is one of the 21 provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo created in the Subdivisions of the DR Congo#New provinces, 2015 repartitioning. Tshuapa, Équateur Province, Équateur, Mongala, Nord-Ubangi, and Sud-Ubangi provinces are ...

province of the

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is t ...

. It is inhabited by Bongando people. The reserve is home to

bonobo The bonobo (; ''Pan paniscus''), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee (less often the dwarf chimpanzee or gracile chimpanzee), is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus ''Pan (genus), Pan'' (the other bei ...

s, threatened due to hunting. The Wamba forest is home to an important population of

s. It was founded in 1973 by Takayoshi Kano, who surveyed the forests of Congo, covering 2,000 km on bicycle. After travelling through occasionally hostile villages, he found Wamba to be friendly, and he could hear bonobo calls from the forest, so he decided to set up a research station here. In 1974, his student Suehisa Kuroda went to Wamba and identified three groups of bonobos, one of which they were able to habituate after a year, by provisioning a sugarcane field. In the past, the local people co-existed with the bonobos and had taboos against eating bushmeat. These have broken down as villagers were forced to hide in the forest during two civil wars. By 2005 an area that once held 300 bonobos now held just 22, with a serious risk of extinction. Under the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, a reforestation project is planned for the

Maringa-Lopori-Wamba Landscape The Maringa-Lopori-Wamba Landscape (MLW) is an ecologically sensitive landscape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo within the Maringa / Lopori basin. Since 1973 a Japanese team has been researching the bonobo population near the village of ...

in an attempt to counter the destruction of bonobo habitat and increase areas where the bonobo are protected. will be replanted, forming corridors to link existing patches of forest, with the project funded by sale of

carbon credit Carbon offsetting is a carbon trading mechanism that enables entities to compensate for offset greenhouse gas emissions by investing in projects that reduce, avoid, or remove emissions elsewhere. When an entity invests in a carbon offsetting p ...

References

Populated places in Tshuapa {{DRCongo-geo-stub