Munich

The civil war raging in the Ivory Coast is counting scientific research among its many victims. Fighting and looting in what was one of Africa's wealthier nations have left international projects on health, agriculture and the environment in disarray.

When conflict between rebel and government troops erupted five months ago, foreign researchers working in disputed regions had to leave their scientific stations for their own safety. For some, the work that they left behind may never be recovered.

Last September, a team led by Eduard Linsenmair, an ecologist at the University of Würzburg, Germany, had to abandon its biodiversity studies in the Comoé National Park. The group has since heard that government troops have impounded the research station's cars and motorcycles.

“We learned that all of the buildings have been broken into and looted,” Linsenmair says. Some of his projects will now be relocated to Benin, Burkina Faso and Ghana, but a lot of the data have been lost, he says.

Others have been a little more fortunate. In September, when rebels took over Bouaké, the Ivory Coast's second largest city, the 30 international researchers at the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) were evacuated. They left behind one of Africa's most important rice gene banks. But some of the team returned on 17 December and recovered some 6,000 samples of recently developed rice varieties, says WARDA's director, Kanayo Nwanze. The association is now moving some of its operations to Mali.

Yasmin Möbius and Tobias Deschner from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig also returned to their project in December. But they found that irreversible damage had been done.

Möbius and Deschner had been studying chimpanzee behaviour in the Taï National Park. Because the chimps are used to humans, they are easy prey for poachers. Soon after the researchers left the station in September, three female and three young chimps, including rare twins, were killed for food.

“We returned voluntarily,” says Möbius. “It was important for us to ward off further attacks on the animals.”

The situation in the national park stayed calm until 3 January, when fighting broke out near the Liberian border. The researchers returned to Abidjan, but left for Germany after fighting in the capital intensified.

A peace plan to end the war was discussed in Paris on 24 January, but has been rejected by supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo. “The war is a catastrophe,” says Linsenmair. “All we can do is wait and hope it will end.”