Kigali — The forest area until recently that remained at the centre of confrontation between locals and government is to be a future site of the Rwanda National Conservation Park, the partners in the project announced on Tuesday, setting into motion one of Africa's most ambitious forest restoration and ecological research efforts ever.

The Rwandan government, along with US-based Great Ape Trust of Iowa and Earthpark said in a statement that the project will restore ecosystem services in the form of improved water quality, reduced soil erosion and flooding, fewer landslides and increased sequestration of carbon.

The project will create the Rwanda National Conservation Park, defined as conservation of biodiversity in an extensively degraded landscape, populated with low-income small-scale agriculturalists.

The partners also said the natural biodiversity of the area will be restored with special emphasis on chimpanzees as a keystone and flagship species. From the same venture, the locals will generate income through ecotourism, investment opportunity and local employment.

The selection of Gishwati as the location for Rwanda's first national conservation park comes less than three months after the project was unveiled at the Clinton Global Initiative by Rwanda President H.E. Paul Kagame and Ted Townsend, founder of Great Ape Trust and Earthpark.

The Gishwati Forest, in Rwanda's Western Province, was partly deforested in the 1980s by agricultural development and in the 1990s during the resettlement of people following the civil war and Genocide. In the year 2000, some 440 families including thousands of returnees were settled in the surrounding areas by government.

Human encroachment, deforestation, grazing and the introduction of small-scale farming resulted in extensive soil erosion, flooding, landslides and reduced water quality - as well as the isolation of a small population of chimpanzees.

Last year, President Paul Kagame personally intervened ordering the relocation of all the people in and around the forest.

Available statistics show that Rwanda has been losing some 500 tons of soil annually per hectare. In 1962, according to environment officials, the country had about 634,000 hectares of forest cover but that by 2004, only 200,000 hectares was still standing.

Making particular reference to Gishwati forest, President Kagame has been concerned blaming "careless" human activity in Rwanda as cause for the disappearance of "98 per cent" of forest's cover.

Once the second-largest indigenous forest in Rwanda, Gishwati extended some 1,0002 km - about 100,000 hectares or 250,000 acres - in the early 1900s. By the late 1980s, Gishwati was about one-fourth its original size.

Resettlement by returning refugees reduced the forest to about 62 km - 600 hectares or 1,500 acres. Reforestation efforts during the past several years have increased Gishwati's forest to approximately 102 km - 1,000 hectares or 2,500 acres.

A team from Great Ape Trust and Earthpark toured the Gishwati region this month, hosted by representatives from the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) and Rwanda National Forestry Authority (NAFA).