Yangambi

Yangambi is a town in Isangi territory of Tshopo Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the north side of the Congo River on the R408 road that links it to Kisangani, 100 kilometres to the east. The road is unpaved and hard to use in the rainy season, so the river is an alternative route, and the small Yangambi Airport once served the town. Mean annual rainfall is 1,835 millimetres. Around the town, 235,000 hectares of forest were declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1976 under the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme. During the colonial era Yangambi hosted INEAC, one of the most important tropical agriculture and forestry research centers in the world, where researchers worked out the relationship between the tenera, dura and pisifera oil palms and found the Yangambi km 5 banana. Since 2017 CIFOR and partners have been rebuilding it as a hub for science and conservation, and since 2020 it hosts the first eddy covariance flux tower in the Congo Basin.