Laikipia Plateau

Part of the 25° South map series — original reference maps of Africa’s safari regions, free to use with attribution.

Laikipia has almost no national parks. Its wildlife lives instead on a patchwork of private ranches, community conservancies and forest reserves — which between them hold Kenya’s second-largest elephant population and most of its black rhino. It is probably the clearest example anywhere in Africa of conservation working on private and community land rather than inside a park boundary, and it is almost never mapped as a whole.

This map runs from the Aberdares and Mount Kenya in the south, across the Laikipia plateau, to the Samburu conservancies and the Mathews Range in the north — 83 protected areas in all. That is the range the elephants actually use; the ecosystem does not stop at the county line, so neither does the map.

The dashed line north-east of Mount Kenya is the Ngare Ndare corridor — the underpass beneath the Nanyuki–Meru road that reconnected the mountain forest to Lewa and the plains beyond it, and which elephants began using within weeks of it opening.

Reserves shown on this map

83 protected areas, alphabetical. Areas are measured from the mapped boundary and rounded to the nearest square kilometre. Names on the map itself are shortened to keep it legible — the full names are here.

Using this map

This map is free to use — on a website, in a print piece, in a presentation — as long as you credit 25° South and link back to this page. That is the whole licence (CC BY 4.0). You do not need to ask us first.

Notes on accuracy

Unlike our South African maps, the areas here have not been cross-checked against operators’ own published figures — they are measured from the mapped boundary only. If you know a figure that differs, tell us.

Two things we left out. The Rift Valley lakes to the west — Nakuru, Bogoria, Soysambu — are a separate landscape rather than part of this one. And a handful of sanctuaries smaller than a square kilometre sit inside larger conservancies, where they would be invisible at this scale; Reteti, inside Namunyak, is the best known of them.

Spotted something wrong? Reserve boundaries change and open data has gaps — tell us and we will correct it.