Annapurna — Landseed

Map key

Indicative range from habitat rules — not sightings

Annapurna Conservation Area

Adjacent reserves

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

Snow leopard

Blue sheep (bharal)

Himalayan tahr

Himalayan musk deer

Red panda

Himalayan monal

Clouded leopard

Himalayan wolf

Kiang

Himalayan black bear

Highways & main roads

Park post / HQ

Altitude bands · ~1,000–7,921 m measured in the park

Permanent snow & ice5,600 m +

Periglacial rock & scree4,800–5,600

Alpine meadow & shrub4,000–4,800

Treeline woodland3,000–4,000

Montane slopes2,000–3,000

Middle-hill slopes1,000–2,000

Subtropical valley floors< 1,000

Bands are altitude, and the edges are our own round contours over our own measurement of the terrain — not a published zonation. Below the treeline they are named as landforms: no vegetation zonation for this conservation area that we are free to use was found, so the site does not assert one. Above the treeline the names follow Shrestha & Wegge 2008 as summarised in Filla et al. 2021 (CC BY), which describes shrublands, alpine meadows and alpine grasslands above the timberline and barren land and permanent snowfields at the top, for its Manang study area. North of the crest, in Manang and Mustang, these same elevations carry trans-Himalayan semi-desert rather than meadow — the range wrings the monsoon out on its southern face.

Annapurna Conservation Area

7,629 km² spanning the Himalayan crest — Nepal's largest protected area and its first Conservation Area, a designation created so that the roughly 100,000 people already living here could stay. : a compact shape for a park this size, because it is bounded by watersheds rather than by farmland.

Area

7,629 km² gazetted

Share of Nepal

5.2% largest protected area

Boundary

~461 km as digitised

Compactness

0.45 Polsby–Popper

Established

1986 gazetted 1992

Elevation

~1,000 – 7,921 m measured on our DEM

A Conservation Area, not a national park — a designation Nepal created so that the people already here could stay: they live inside it by design

Managed by a trust, not the state — the National Trust for Nature Conservation, through the Annapurna Conservation Area Project

Began as one village — a pilot in Ghandruk covering ~200 km² in 1986; 1,500 km² by 1990; gazetted at 7,629 km² in 1992

128 species of wild mammal recorded, across five districts and 15 rural municipalities.

Area, dates, districts and the mammal count: NTNC / Annapurna Conservation Area Project. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 4497739. Note: that OSM ring measures ~7,535 km², about 1.2% less than the gazetted 7,629 km² — unusually close agreement for an OSM protected-area ring, but the drawn shape is still not cadastral and every area figure shown comes from NTNC, not from the outline. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring and are scale-dependent (the true boundary is longer). Elevation is our own measurement, not a cited figure. The baked z12 terrain raster (AWS Terrain Tiles) clipped to that same OSM ring reaches 7,921 m on Annapurna I — a ~135 m grid cannot resolve a knife-edge summit, so the modelled maximum is a floor, not the peak's height. The low end is stated as ~1,000 m, the 0.1st percentile of the terrain inside the ring (965 m), rather than as a raw minimum: this DEM carries radar voids in the deepest shaded gorges, and 49 of its 524,966 in-ring cells fall below 790 m with the lowest reading 398 m where the ground is nearer 2,000 m. A raw minimum here would be an artefact, not a valley floor. Dhaulagiri I (8,167 m) and Manaslu (8,163 m) appear on the map but lie outside the boundary, which is why the park's own high point is Annapurna I.

Imagery: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023-2025) · Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles · Boundaries & water: OpenStreetMap (ODbL) · An independent visualization by Landseed PBC. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for NTNC-ACAP.