The site covers an area of 28,740 hectares, and it is located just outside the major town of Ada[2] and to the west of the Volta River estuary.

Adropogon guyanus, Heteropogon contortus, and Azadirachta indica are common around the catchment areas while Rhizophora racemosa and Avicennia africana are found along the creeks.

Reeds, fuel wood, tilapia, crab, and other game are harvested from the site on a mainly subsistence basis[4] while salt is extracted for widespread distribution to Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Nigeria.

A small section of the site, called the Yomo lagoon, has been spared from land cultivation for the salt mines.

This decision was made in deference to a sect of local people who consider the Yomo lagoon to be a consecrated area.

The area's two bird watching platforms, one in Pute and one in Lolanya, host the birders while they observe and photograph varieties such as sandwich, black, royal, roseate, and little terns, black-winged stilts, ringed plovers, curlew sandpipers, spotted redshanks, and greenshanks.

[7] Other visitors prefer to tour the site by boat, readily booking trips privately or through the Manet Paradise Hotel.

Some common cases are over-fishing, extreme harvesting of mangroves, extensive drainage and cultivation for farmland, heavy grazing by cattle and livestock, and an unsustainable level of salt winning.

Although ecotourism provides an ecologically friendly source of income, the practice is not extensive enough to sustain the local communities.

Additional threats originate from the use of pesticides and herbicides, the damming of creeks and channels for the purpose of expanding infrastructure, and rubbish dumping.

Another realized effect of human exploitation is the apparent shrinking of the lagoon, which can be easily observed in the satellite photo comparison shown at the opening of this article.

[4] In 2022, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report included Songhor Lagoon in the list of African natural heritage sites which would be threatened by flooding and coastal erosion by the end of the century, but only if climate change followed RCP 8.5, which is the scenario of high and continually increasing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the warming of over 4 °C.,[11] and is no longer considered very likely.