The Bakossi landscape encompasses a wide range of habitats at different elevations across its 29,320 hectares in southwestern Cameroon. Tropical lowland forest gives way to montane habitats as the terrain climbs, creating ecological niches that have allowed plant species to evolve in isolation. The concentrations of rare plants cluster in the northern and southern reaches of the park, perhaps because these areas offer better food and shelter for pollinators and seed dispersers, or perhaps because lower levels of hunting and farmland encroachment have allowed more fragile species to persist. The sheer density of botanical discovery in the Kupe-Bakossi inventory surprised even the researchers who conducted it. A region that had been overlooked for decades turned out to be one of the richest plant communities in tropical Africa.

Creating a national park in a region where people depend on the forest for their livelihoods is never simple. The field consultation program, completed in 2004 with support from the World Wildlife Fund's Coastal Forests Programme and the San Diego Zoo's Center for Conservation and Research for Endangered Species, spent years engaging with local communities. Over eighty villages signed legislative support for the park's creation, an unusually broad base of local consent. Boundary adjustments were negotiated to preserve community rights, and sacred forest areas belonging to the Bakossi people were expected to be incorporated into the park's boundaries. The process took longer than planned. After several delays, the park was officially inaugurated in early 2008 by a decree signed by Prime Minister Ephraim Inoni and Minister of Forests Elvis Ngollengolle.

Creation was only the beginning. A 2011 report noted that the park still needed to complete its establishment process, demarcate its boundaries, and finalize a management plan. Eco-guards had to be recruited, trained, and equipped. Communities needed education in conservation practices and involvement in ape surveys, since the park shelters not only rare plants but also the endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee and the drill. The region is home primarily to the Bakossi people, alongside Mbo, Manehas, Bakem, Baneka, and immigrant Bamileke communities, each with their own relationship to the forest and its resources. Building a park that works for all of them remains an unfinished project.

Even as the park struggled to establish itself, a new threat emerged. The US-based Herakles Farms acquired a Cameroonian palm oil operation whose original concession included 132 hectares of the national park itself. Conservation groups sounded the alarm, calling the project an ecological disaster in the making. Herakles responded that its plantations would follow the highest environmental and social standards, complying with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil's principles. The confrontation crystallized a tension that defines conservation across tropical Africa: the collision between international commodity markets and local ecosystems. For Bakossi, a park justified by the uniqueness of its plant life, the stakes are particularly acute. Those 82 species found nowhere else cannot relocate. If their habitat disappears, they disappear with it, and no amount of sustainable certification can bring back what no one knew existed until the botanists came looking.