Near Azrou, Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco Photograph by Tedd Buelow   Northern Africa: Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia Temperate Coniferous Forests   9,000 square miles (23,400 square kilometers) -- about the size of New Hampshire Critical/Endangered

· An African Winter Wonderland
· Special Features
· Did You Know?
· Wild Side
· Cause for Concern
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An African Winter Wonderland

When you imagine an African forest, you probably don’t picture snow-covered evergreen trees. But if you were to visit this ecoregion during the cold season, you might think you’d stepped into a winter wonderland! Here in the mountains of northern Morocco and Algeria, moist conifer and mixed broadleaf forests flourish. The air is misty and damp, and in the higher elevations winter snowfalls are common.

Special Features

This ecoregion has an extremely high number of endemic and relict plant species. The Marocano fir--with its thick, twisted, and forked trunk--is found only in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. And, in the mountains of Algeria, Algerian firs may grow as tall as 65 feet (20 m). Small clusters of rare conifer trees survive in only a few isolated areas where the air is particularly cold and moist. These mountain forests are important stopovers for birds migrating between northern Europe and Africa.

	During the French colonization of Algeria, people harvested cork oak to supply corks for the French wine industry. Cork harvesting is a delicate process, because cutting the bark too deeply will kill the tree. But if the cork is harvested correctly, each tree can remain commercially productive for up to 150 years.

Wild Side

Barbary macaques use their powerful limbs to move through this ecoregion’s conifer forests, searching for fruits and leaves. The only primates found north of the Sahara Desert, these stocky gray-and-brown monkeys have lost much of their habitat due to human encroachment, making them a threatened species. The Barbary leopard, stockier and with thicker fur than its southern relatives, is also severely threatened--in fact, scientists believe there may now be only a dozen individuals left in the wild. These conifer forests are also home to several endemic species, such as the Moroccan grayling butterfly and the Moroccan nuthatch, as well as red foxes, common jackals, Algerian hedgehogs, and African wild cats. In the Algerian cork oak forests on the Tunisian border, the last population of the endangered Barbary red deer struggles to survive. An endangered subspecies of serval, a small spotted cat, also inhabits these forests.

Cause for Concern

Human impact in this ecoregion is severe. People used to live a semi-nomadic lifestyle here, moving from place to place several times during the year. But now they tend to settle in one place for long periods of time. During the winters, these people must gather large amounts of firewood for heating, and their livestock often graze the forest understory to get enough food to survive. Illegal logging and uncontrolled harvesting of medicinal plants are serious concerns.

For more information on this ecoregion, go to the World Wildlife Fund Scientific Report.