Diawling National Park — Engineered Reflooding of the Senegal River Delta Floodplain (Mauritania)

The Diama and Manantali dams on the Senegal River (built in the 1980s) ended the river's natural annual flood pulse, drying out the Diawling floodplain in Mauritania and devastating the fisheries, grazing and wildlife that depended on seasonal flooding.

In 1991 Mauritania created Diawling National Park and, working with IUCN, built a system of dikes and sluice gates to artificially recreate the flood pulse, releasing water on a managed schedule to reflood roughly 16,000 hectares of former floodplain.

Ramsar and IUCN documentation records waterbird counts collapsing to just 2 birds in the depressions during the 1994 low-water year, then rising to nearly 50,000 after the first full engineered reflooding in 1995 — a directly attributable before/after result tied to the water releases.

The park exists explicitly to compensate for upstream dam damage rather than restoring natural hydrology — it depends indefinitely on continued artificial releases. Carnegie Endowment reporting documents ongoing pressure to convert park land to irrigated agriculture, which could undermine the gains.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ramsar.org/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/lib/hbk4-07cs12.pdf