Lag Dere

Lag Dere Wildlife Reserve is listed (spelled "Lack dare") among the nine wildlife reserves of Somalia in the UN List of Protected Areas, which records it as designated but gives no year of designation, no area and no IUCN category.^[1] A Lack Dare Wildlife Reserve is also listed among Somalia's protected areas.^[2] Somalia's 2015 National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan refers to a "Lag-Dere region" along the Kenyan border without defining its extent.^[3]

Somalia's 2015 National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan described the hirola (Beatragus hunteri) as reduced, through over-hunting elsewhere, to the Lag-Dere region along the Kenyan border^[3]. The hirola is a critically endangered antelope whose natural range covers no more than 1,500 km² on the Kenya–Somalia border; it is now found only in Kenya, along the Somali border, and a 2010 survey estimated 402 to 466 animals^[4].

The UN List of Protected Areas records no year of designation for the reserve.^[1] Eleven wildlife areas have been declared in Somalia since the 1970s, but only two were thought to be functional, and no formal protection has been offered to any of them since the early 1990s.^[5]

Nature Somalia states that no protected areas remained functional after the 1991 collapse of the central government.^[6] The causes of the hirola's decline are not known, but are likely a combination of disease (particularly rinderpest), hunting, severe drought, predation, competition from livestock and habitat loss from woody plant encroachment.^[4]