Late last week, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government announced the creation of the country?s first new national park in more than four decades. Spanning an area of Congo Basin almost twice the size of the U.S. state of Delaware, Lomami National Park brings stronger protections to an area home to unique wildlife threatened by increasing human disturbance.

From 2001 through 2014, the DRC lost nearly 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of its tree cover, according to the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch. In other words, the DRC lost an area of forest the size of Austria in 15 years. Over that time, deforestation trended upward, with more tree cover lost in 2014 than in any year prior. Of that loss, 67 percent occurred in primary forest.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is experiencing increasing deforestation, with 2014 (the last date for which data are available) seeing the most tree cover loss in the past 15 years. The new Lomami National Park is situated in a region that has been left relatively untouched. [Source: Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA, accessed through Global Forest Watch].

The location of the national park not known by anyone to even researchers until scientists began to survey the area in 2007 through a project termed TL2 – named after Tshuapa, Lomami, and Lualaba rivers that flow through the forest area. During their survey, researchers discovered a new monkey not known to science: the Lesula (Cercopithecus lomamiensis), a uniquely colorful member of the guenon family with a strangely human face. According to John A. Hart, a researcher with the TL2 Project, the monkey was discovered in 2007 and has a brilliant blue colour which is really spectacular and pretty.

After nearly a decade of surveying, Lomami National Park was officially established last week, July 7, by DRC Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo. The creation of the new 2.2 million-acre Lomami National Park grants protection to a remote, relatively unscathed area home to an abundance of wildlife.