Spread across six countries, and covering more than 1.3 million square miles – an area twice the size of Alaska – the Congo Basin includes an expanse of rainforest second only in size to the ...

Aerial photograph of the Congo rainforest. Credit: University of California, Los Angeles About 650,000 hectares of land was scanned in fine detail.

The Congo is the world’s second largest rainforest. It has suffered greatly from two civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The first lasted from 1996-1997; the second from 1998-2003.

A vast rainforest stretches for 1,500 miles across central Africa. The mighty Congo River and its tributaries are the main highways into this hard-to-reach region.