The Greater Kruger region in South Africa is a vast, interconnected landscape of forests, savannas, and grasslands that includes Kruger National Park and several private and community nature reserves near the park.
The Greater Kruger region in South Africa is a vast, interconnected landscape of forests, savannas, and grasslands that includes Kruger National Park and several private and community nature reserves near the park. It’s a haven of biodiversity that harbors the “Big Five” game animals along with rare and endangered wildlife such as pangolins, cheetahs, and ground hornbills.
It’s also a dynamic region, with fast-growing towns to the west, extensive fuelwood and timber harvesting, a thriving tourism industry, widespread agriculture, and pockets of mining. Given the potential for conflict between people and wildlife, it has also become a focal point of “rewilding”—an effort involving the park and several nearby nature reserves to restore wildlife habitat and more natural migration patterns by removing fences, returning pasture and farmland to nature, and rethinking the distribution of artificial watering holes.
From the 1960s through the 1990s, many of the reserves were fenced, preventing animals from moving freely between them and the national park. Starting in the 1990s, reserves began removing fences, creating a rare opportunity for scientists to study how large-scale changes—such as rapid increases in elephant populations—might affect vegetation and ecosystems.
Read More: NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and data from Filippelli, S., et al. (2025).
