South Luangwa — Landseed

Map key

Indicative range from habitat rules — not sightings

South Luangwa National Park

Adjacent national parks

Game management areas hunting permitted

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

Leopard

African wild dog

Luangwa giraffe endemic

Spotted hyena

Lion

Savanna elephant

Hippopotamus

Puku

Crawshay's zebra

Roads & tracks

Gate / settlement

Human settlement · modelled 2020

People per 100 m cell

scatteredtown

South Luangwa NP0.17 / km²

Lupande GMA17.38 / km²

Modelled, not counted. WorldPop constrained 2020 places people only where built settlement is observed; summed by us inside each drawn ring — 1,449 in the park across 8,671 km², 89,855 in Lupande across 5,170 km².

Altitude bands · 467–1,656 m in the park

Muchinga Escarpment crest1,000–1,656

Escarpment slope700–1,000

Valley floor550–700

Floodplain & river467–550

Bands are altitude and they are landforms, not vegetation: the valley's mopane grows on the floor and up onto the lower slope, so an elevation key cannot carry a vegetation claim. The park is the rift floor — 95% of it lies below 722 m, and the top band is about 60 km² where the boundary climbs the escarpment.

Live · active fire

Active fire—24h

The dry season here runs roughly May–October and near-total burning across this region is the normal state of a fire-driven savanna. Much of the burning inside the boundary is early-season management fire. These are detections, not damage.

NASA FIRMS · VIIRS SNPP/NOAA-20, 24h

South Luangwa National Park

The floor of the Luangwa Rift, walled on the west by the Muchinga Escarpment and bounded for most of its eastern length by the Luangwa River itself. That ratio is what a park shaped by a river looks like: the eastern edge is not a survey line but a channel that moves, and the sinuosity is the river's, not a cartographer's.

Area

9,050 km² stated by DNPW

Ring drawn here

8,671 km² measured

Boundary

627 km as digitised

Compactness

0.28 Polsby–Popper

Established

1972 reserve from 1938

Elevation

467 – 1,656 m measured, in the park

No dam on the main stem — in 2019 Zambia cancelled the pre-feasibility study for the Ndevu Gorge hydropower project, which would have impounded the river upstream of the park.

Two large mammals endemic to this valley — the Luangwa (Thornicroft's) giraffe and Cookson's wildebeest occur here and nowhere else on Earth.

A measured protection gradient — 8.50 leopards per 100 km² inside the park against 5.08 in the adjoining Lupande Game Management Area, from the same camera-trap survey.

Game reserve from 1938, national park from 1972. The gazetting instrument fixing the 9,050 km² figure was not located for this build, so that area is stated as DNPW's, not as gazetted.

Why this park matters beyond Zambia

A rift floor, not a valley. The Luangwa Rift is 130 km wide and 500 km long, with two main escarpments over a kilometre high, and it takes about 0.7 mm per year of extension. It began as a Permo-Triassic Karoo half-graben and was reactivated in the Neogene. The park sits on the floor: 95% of it lies below 722 m, and every bit of relief in frame is the escarpment rising along the western edge. The subject here is not what rises — it is what the rising ground encloses.

A river still free to move. With no dam on the main stem, the Luangwa still cuts new channels and abandons old ones. The lagoons scattered across the meander belt are its abandoned meanders, and the raw cut banks are made by the same process. Of 91 standing water bodies mapped across the valley, 76 fall within the close plate around Mfuwe and the Nsefu Sector.

Prey, not persecution. Camera-trap capture–recapture across this boundary in 2012–2014 found leopard density inside the park at 8.50 per 100 km² against 5.08 in the adjoining GMA, with survival and sex ratio not detectably different between the two — so the gap is the prey base, depleted by bushmeat snaring outside, rather than leopards being killed at a higher rate there. The same pattern runs through the guild: wild dogs here reach a density their own researchers call among the highest on record, against 0.8 per 100 km² in prey-depleted Kafue, from identical models and identical field methods.

An endemic with a measured edge. A 2025 rangewide survey of the Luangwa giraffe — extending 120 km south of its officially recognised extent — estimated 651–890 animals and found density falling to zero beyond 7.5 km from a permanent river. That published threshold is the rule the giraffe markers on this map are placed from, which is why they follow the water.

Area and designation: Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW), Ministry of Tourism, Zambia. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 8183160 (ODbL). Note the gap: that OSM ring measures 8,671.12 km², about 4.2% less than the 9,050 km² DNPW states. The site draws OSM and states DNPW's figure, and prints both rather than reconciling them; the boundary length and compactness above are computed from the drawn ring at OSM's generalisation and are therefore scale-dependent. The elevation range is measured by us from the Copernicus GLO-30 DEM masked to that ring, and is labelled as measured. Sources for the figures above: leopard and the protection gradient — Rosenblatt et al. 2016, Ecology and Evolution 6(11):3772–3785; wild dog — Creel et al. 2023, Biological Conservation 282:110043; Luangwa giraffe — Sun et al. 2025, Scientific Reports 15:16435; rift geology — Wedmore et al. 2022, Solid Earth 13:1731–1753. Full record, including what this build could not establish, in docs/research-record.json. Not claimed: South Luangwa is not a World Heritage site and no IUCN narrative or protected-area assessment is used anywhere on this site.

Imagery: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022–2026), 6% of the wide frame has no coverage · Elevation: Copernicus GLO-30 via AWS Terrain Tiles · Boundaries, water & roads: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · Silhouettes: PhyloPic (CC0) · Population: WorldPop (University of Southampton), CC BY 4.0 · Source of building footprints: Ecopia Vector Maps Powered by Maxar Satellite Imagery (C) 2020 · An independent visualization by Landseed PBC. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for DNPW or Conservation South Luangwa; CSL figures are quoted from their own published material and are attributed on the page.