Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 24
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GORONGOSA SPECIAL
It’s also a location that hasn’t been studied deeply until recently. The
park was established in 1960 and became known for its vast numbers of
hippos, wildebeest, and zebras unique to Gorongosa. But as the park was
beginning to gain interest from scientists, Mozambique was going through
turbulent times. It gained sovereignty from Portugal in 1975 after a decadelong war for independence, then spiraled into another civil war three years
later. That war lasted 16 years, and Gorongosa was a hotspot of fighting,
whiplashing between government and rebel control. When scientists were
able to return to the park safely in the 1990s, the landscape was there, but
up to 90 percent of the wildlife had disappeared.
It’s impossible, of course, to do effective conservation without knowing what you’re trying to protect, especially when resources are extremely
limited. Gorongosa is an enormous space—about 1 million hectares that
include, uncommonly for a national park, a peripheral area where people
live in settlements and villages—so the park wants to deploy resources
in the most targeted way possible. Gorongosa Map of Life focuses on the
centers of endemic species because that’s where conservation can make
the most impact. One of those hot spots is Mount Gorongosa, elevation
6,112 feet, an isolated mountain that, at 18.4 degrees south of the equator, holds the remnants of one of the southernmost tropical rainforests
in Africa. “Having this type of a map, knowing exactly what we have and
where, allows us to make wiser and better decisions about how to do conservation,” Naskrecki says.
In 2008, the park entered into a public-private partnership with the Carr
Foundation to rewild the area, and has since gone through a renaissance.
The park also works with local communities to promote opportunities in
an area that has struggled economically. Vitally, the scientists studying
Gorongosa also live and work on site. “Particularly in Mozambique, there
have been huge gaps in the history of natural research, so there are many
things we do not know about yet,” says Bart Wusten, a botanist based in
Belgium who has been working with Gorongosa for decades, doing surveys
of vegetation. The data he has collected can now help set a baseline for
future studies.
has collected approximately
210,000 individual observations across different habitats and across different timelines. The participating scientists discovered over 200 species new
to science—from mammals to invertebrates and plants. Other species that
exist only in the park include a katydid whose loud nocturnal serenades
dominate the mountain soundscape yet are undetectable by humans, and
a new species of long-fingered bat. It’s the most extensive scientific biodiversity work in Africa, with samples and data points stored in a lab at the
park and also sent across the world to nearly 70 partnering universities.
The map also allows scientists to see deeper into the hidden connections between organisms. They have documented insects that change
their behavior in response to bat predation. The scientists have been able
SO FAR, THE GORONGOSA MAP OF LIFE
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