Tanzania’s famous Serengeti National Park in Tanzania lies within the Serenget-Mara ecosystem, stretching over 14,763 km2 (5,700 sq mi), in the Mara and Simiyu regions and contains 15,000,000 hectares (37,000,000 acres) of savanna. It is also listed as a World Heritage Site.

The name “Serengeti” is an approximation of the word siringeti used by the Maasai people for the area, which means “the place where the land runs on forever”. It is well known for the largest annual animal migration in the world of over 1.5 million wildebeest and 250,000 Common zebras. It holds the largest lion population in Africa as well as a large Nile crocodile population due in part to the abundance of prey species.

Serengeti National Park formed a Lion Conservation Unit in 2005 together with the Maasai Mara National Reserve. More than 3,000 lions live in this ecosystem. The population density of the African leopard is estimated at 5.41 individuals per 100 km2 (39 sq mi) in the dry season.
The history of this most famous wildlife sanctuary in the world started far back in 1930, an area of 2,286 square kilometers (883 sq mi) was designated as a game reserve in southern and eastern Serengeti. In the 1930s, the government of Tanganyika established a system of national parks compliant with the Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State. The area became a national park in 1940. It was granted strict protection in 1948 when the Serengeti National Park Board of Trustees was formed to administer the national park. The government restricted the movements of the resident Maasai people, and the park boundaries were finalized in 1951. In 1959, an area of 8,300 km2 (3,200 sq mi) was split off in the eastern part of the national park and re-established as Ngorongoro Conservation Area intended to accommodate the traditional land use interests of the Maasai people in a multiple land use area.

The Serengeti gained fame after Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael produced a book and documentary titled Serengeti Shall Not Die in 1959 highlighting the Great migration.
The great migration is the world’s longest overland migration. The complete migration route is around 800 km (500 mi). South of this migration route covers the Ngorongoro Conservation Area where around half a million wildebeests are born between January and March. By March, at the beginning of the dry season, roughly 1.5 million wildebeest and 250,000 zebras start to migrate heading north towards Maasai Mara in Kenya. Common eland, plains zebra, and Thomson’s gazelle join the wildebeest. In April and May, the migrating herds pass through the Western Corridor to get to the Maasai Mara, the herds have to cross the Grumeti and Mara Rivers where around 3,000 crocodiles lie in wait. For every wildebeest captured by the crocodiles, 50 drown. When the dry season ends in late October, the migrating herds start to head back south. Around 250,000 wildebeests and 30,000 plains zebras die annually from drowning, predation, exhaustion, thirst, or disease.