• Summary
• Text account
• Data table and detailed info
• Map
• Reference and further resources

Site description (2001 baseline)
The site consists of a length of about 21 km of the Senegal river and its immediate riparian habitat. It lies upstream of Djoudj wetlands (site SN001) and north of both Ndiaël basin (SN002) and Lac de Guiers (SN003). The habitat consists of highly modified and cultivated areas of land, with extensive rice-fields and market gardens and associated irrigation and drainage canals and ditches, adjacent to areas of fairly dense human habitation. The site is very closely linked to Lac de Guiers, which receives water from the river through sluices and a canal located at Richard-Toll. Between this site and Lac de Guiers lie extensive sugar-cane plantations. The site lies in the Sahel zone and the original habitat would have been thorn-bush savanna, dominated by Acacia spp. and Balanites aegyptiaca, shrubs of Boscia senegalensis and Salvadora persica, and larger trees adjacent to the river itself, including Combretum aculeatum, Grewia bicolor, Bombax costatum and Borassus aethiopicum. There were once extensive forests of Acacia nilotica along the banks of the Senegal river that were regularly inundated by floods and formed important refuges for Palearctic migrants. These forests have largely disappeared as a result of drought and exploitation for fuelwood.

Key biodiversity
See Box and Table 2 for key species. This site is unique in Senegal due to the presence (for more than 35 years) of ornithologists Gérard and Marie-Yvonne Morel at the ‘Station d’Ecologie’ in Richard-Toll, funded by the French overseas research organization IRD (formerly ‘ORSTOM’). As a result of their work and that of other visiting research staff using the station, the intensity of bird observations for Richard-Toll and the immediate area far exceeds that for almost any other area of the country. The site is important for many waterbirds and some raptors. There are past records of the globally threatened Marmaronetta angustirostris (but none recorded since the 1970s), and more recent records in the general area of the site for Circus macrourus and Falco naumanni, both of which are recorded on passage in “the lower Senegal valley”. There is also a record of ‘thousands’ of F. naumanni from Richard-Toll in 1958. Observer effort is reflected particularly in the biome-restricted species lists. Seven species of the Sudan–Guinea Savanna biome (A04) have been recorded from the site (Table 2). In addition to the count of 26,000 Philomachus pugnax in 1994, there are several other recent records of significant totals of this species as well as suspected roosts or pre-roosts in rice-fields in the general area of the site (e.g. at Boundoum), suggesting that the species is “regularly occurring”. Other records of waterbirds at Richard-Toll include breeding Casmerodius albus, Threskiornis aethiopicus and Platalea alba, and wintering Nycticorax nycticorax (though several of the breeding records in particular are from earlier decades).

Non-bird biodiversity: The mammal Trichechus senegalensis (VU) probably still occurs in the river, although sightings are infrequent (a stranded individual was rescued from the river at Matam in 1997, several hundred kilometres upstream of Richard-Toll).

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Recommended citation
BirdLife International (2024) Important Bird Area factsheet: River Sénégal (Ntiagar to Richard-Toll) (Senegal). Downloaded from https://datazone.birdlife.org/site/factsheet/river-sénégal-(ntiagar-to-richard-toll)-iba-senegal on 22/11/2024.