Gunung Leuser National Park

Gunung Leuser National Park covers 7,927 square kilometres in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, across the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra. It sits in the Barisan mountain range and is named after Mount Leuser, which is 3,119 metres high. Together with Bukit Barisan Selatan and Kerinci Seblat National Parks, it forms the World Heritage Site called Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra.

The park is about 150 kilometres long and over 100 kilometres wide, and mostly mountainous. It is one of only two remaining habitats of the Sumatran orangutan. Visitors can see orangutans at the sanctuary at Bukit Lawang inside the park. The globe marks it as a rainforest where these red-haired apes live.

Mountains and jungle

About 40 percent of the park, mostly in the northwest, is steep and over 1,500 metres high. It is billed as the largest wilderness area in Southeast Asia. Around 12 percent, in the lower south, lies below 600 metres.

Eleven peaks rise above 2,700 metres. The highest is Mount Tanpa Nama at 3,466 metres, the second-highest peak in Sumatra after Mount Kerinci (3,805 metres).

Who lives here

Besides Sumatran orangutans, the park shelters Sumatran elephants, Sumatran tigers, Sumatran rhinoceroses, siamangs, Sumatran serows, sambar deer and leopard cats. Herman Rijksen set up the Ketambe Research Station in 1971 to study orangutans.

In 2011, researchers placed 28 camera traps and, six months later, had found one male and six females of the rhino. They estimated no more than 27 rhinos in the park, out of around 200 in all of Sumatra and Malaysia.

Why the forest matters to people

Rivers from the forest give water to nearby homes and farms, and fisheries along the coast bring in more than 171 million US dollars a year. When forests are cleared, rivers can dry out part of the year and floods get worse.

Storm flows from a secondary forest are about three times higher than from a similar patch of original forest. Floods in Aceh in December 2000 killed at least 190 people and left 660,000 homeless.

On the globe

The toy globe marks Gunung Leuser in northern Sumatra. Zoom in to see the rainforest of the orangutans.