The Serengeti is well known for the largest annual animal migration in the world of over 1.5 million blue wildebeest and 250,000 zebra along with smaller herds of Thomson's gazelle and eland.

The name "Serengeti" is an approximation of the word siringet used by the Maasai people for the area, which means "the place where the land runs on forever".

[4] 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.

[citation needed] In 1930, major Richard Hingdston, visiting Tanganyika on a mission from the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE), proposed that the Serengeti Game Reserve be designated as a national park to ensure its protection from the pressures of population growth and economic development.

[14] African bush elephant herds recovered from a population low in the 1980s caused by poaching, and numbered over 5,000 individuals by 2014.

[21] Primates such as yellow and olive baboons, vervet monkey, and mantled guereza are also seen in the gallery forests of the Grumeti River.

South of this migration route covers the Ngorongoro Conservation Area where around half a million wildebeest 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 north towards Maasai Mara in Kenya.

The grasslands grow on deposits of volcanic ash from the Kerimasi Volcano, which erupted 150,000 years ago, and also from the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcanic eruptions, which created layers of calcareous tuff and calcitic hard-pan soil (vertisols) from rapid weathering of the natrocarbonatite lava produced by the volcanoes.

The landscape of the Serengeti Plain is extremely varied, ranging from savannah to hilly woodlands to open grasslands.

The region's geographic diversity is due to the extreme weather conditions that plague the area, particularly the potent combination of heat and wind.

The diverse habitats in the region may have originated from a series of volcanoes, whose activity shaped the basic geographic features of the plain by adding mountains and craters to the landscape.

Advocates argued that the road would improve connectivity and alleviate poverty in northern Tanzania, while conservationists warn of severe ecological impacts, including disruption of the wildebeest migration and potential ecosystem collapse.