Wood Buffalo National Park

Wood Buffalo National Park

Wood Buffalo National Park is located in the extreme north of the province of Alberta and in the south of the Northwest Territories. It covers a gigantic area of 44,800 square kilometres, which is about the size of Switzerland and it is a park of superlatives. It is the largest National Park in Canada and the second largest in the world. In addition to endless green coniferous forests, salt plains, wide grasslands, craggy mountains with deep gorges and canyons, tundra and swampy peat bog, Wood Buffalo National Park also includes the Peace-Athabasca Delta, which is one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world.

Wood Buffalo owes its establishment and its name to another superlative, for the largest wild bison herd in the world lives in the park. They are also the reason for park’s founding in 1922. At that time the herd counted less than 100 and it was crucial to ensure their survival. Today about 6,000 animals roam freely across the expanse of the park.

While the bison population has recovered in Wood Buffalo, it is now the UNESCO World Heritage status, which must be protected. The greatest danger to it is posed by industrial oil sands mining, which takes place right next to the park, and contaminates its waterways. This not only threatens the habitat of rhinoceros pelicans and bald eagles, but also the last nesting sites of the threatened Whooping Crane, which Wood Buffalo National Park is home to.