If you were to wait outside the gate of an African protected area, who would you see? Tourists straddled with cameras and binoculars. School children ahead of their long-anticipated field trip. A pair of honeymooners enamoured by the sunrise, and each other.

These visitors breathe life into protected areas. They provide income, social support, and political backing. Their presence makes a case to continue conservation efforts, not just for nature, but also for the people who get to experience it.

Despite how important visitors are, we know very little about how many people visit protected areas across large parts of the continent. Our new study set out to change this. We brought together visitor data from various sources into a single comprehensive dataset of protected area visitation in Africa. We expanded on existing data sources by scouring the peer-reviewed and grey literature and reaching out to national authorities. The outcome is an open dataset containing 4,216 records from 341 protected areas across 34 countries.

We brought together data for big and small protected areas: from the 52,800 km² Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana, to the tiny Popo Game Park in Namibia only covering a set of cascading rapids on the Okavango River. Four out of five records in the dataset were from between 2000 and 2020, but four Kenyan protected areas (Aberdare, Mount Kenya, Tsavo East, and Tsavo West) had 55 years of uninterrupted visitation data going back to the 1960s.

The most represented countries in the dataset were Madagascar (33 protected areas), Ghana (30 protected areas), Zimbabwe (25 protected areas), South Africa (24 protected areas), and Tanzania (24 protected areas). But data gaps across North Africa, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, and parts of West Africa remind us that there is still room for improvement.

Only two protected areas received more than one million visitors per year on average and both are in South Africa: Table Mountain National Park (2.4 million visitors per year) and Kruger National Park (1.5 million visitors per year). About a third of protected areas received more than 10,000 visitors per year, and 7.8% received more than 100,000 visitors per year.

We encourage all researchers and policy officials to use our dataset in any way that might be useful to them. The data are compatible with the World Database on Protected Areas, making it easy to incorporate visitation data in spatial analyses. We also invite anyone with their own visitation data to contact us should they want to grow the dataset with their information.

The people waiting at the protected area’s gate should not be seen as separate from plants and animals inside. They form part of the intertwined socio-ecological system that determines whether conservation succeeds or not. Ultimately, we hope that the dataset on African protected area visitation serves as a bridge between the human and nature dimensions of protected areas.