Mali Geography, Climate & Nature

Mali is a landlocked country of 1,240,192 square kilometres, the eighth-largest in Africa, extending south-west from the southern Sahara through the Sahel to the Sudanian savanna. The north is desert, the domain of nomadic Arab and Tuareg peoples; the south, where most Malians live, is savanna crossed by the Niger and Senegal rivers. The highest point is Hombori Tondo, 1,155 metres, and the lowest the Senegal River at 23 metres.

The Niger River is, in the encyclopaedia's phrase, the country's lifeblood: food, drinking water, irrigation and transport. The third-longest river in Africa, it flows away from the sea into the desert, spreads into an inland delta around Mopti in the rainy season, and takes a sharp turn near Timbuktu to head south-east toward the Gulf of Guinea. Bamako, Ségou, Mopti, Timbuktu and Gao all stand on it.

East of Mopti the Bandiagara escarpment rises 500 metres above the sandy plain and runs for 150 kilometres, with the Dogon villages built along its foot and into its cliffs. Most of the country receives negligible rainfall and droughts are very frequent; the rainy season, late April to early October, reaches only the south.

Mali is one of the hottest countries in the world, with a hot, sunny and dry climate; the thermal equator, the line of the planet's highest mean annual temperatures, crosses it. Most of the country receives negligible rainfall and droughts are very frequent. The rainy season, from late April to early October, reaches the southernmost area; the central belt has a hot semi-arid climate with a long, intense dry season and a brief, irregular rainy one; the north is desert.

The hazards are the ones the advisories name: seasonal flooding in the rainy season that can hamper overland travel, close roads and damage bridges; frequent dust and sand storms; and the dust-laden harmattan wind of the dry season, which brings a haze that can ground aircraft and aggravates respiratory disease. The climate article the site relies on gives no temperature figures, so none are repeated here.

Best Destinations by Month has the calendar, with its caveat.

Mali's natural inheritance is the Niger River and what it floods. The river spreads each rainy season into an inland delta around Mopti that is the country's fishery and pasture, and the Sudanian savanna of the south, where the Niger and Senegal rivers run, holds most of the people and most of the life. North of it the Sahel thins into the Sahara, where most of the country receives negligible rainfall and droughts are very frequent.

The encyclopaedia pages opened for this page carry no species inventory or protected-area count for Mali, and none is invented here. What can be said is structural: a country of 1,240,192 square kilometres, two-thirds of it desert or semi-desert, whose biodiversity lives along one river and in one belt of savanna, both under the pressure of drought and of a war that has emptied the field stations.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

This page says only what its sources say, and on Mali's wildlife they say little. The Niger River's inland delta around Mopti is the country's great wetland, and the river itself is described as its lifeblood for fish as for people; the Bandiagara escarpment and the Dogon plateau are the landscape most visitors saw. The elephants of the Gourma, the manatees of the river and the birds of the delta appear in no sentence opened for this page, and stay out of it.

The advisories add the practical zoology: rabies is common and carried by dogs and bats; malaria, yellow fever, dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases are present; and freshwater carries schistosomiasis, so the river is not for swimming.