Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 59
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
crickets as an indicator taxon to demonstrate how
fire and the presence of large mammals affect insect
diversity.
After he graduated in 2022, he was hired by the
Pringle Lab at Princeton University, which has been
researching large-scale ecosystem restoration and
predator-prey dynamics, among other things—and
continues to work in the park. He says he couldn’t
have imagined any of this as an undergrad in forestry
studies at the Gaza Polytechnic Institute. For Tenente,
the park now feels like home, even though time in the
field means that he occasionally has to sprint away from
elephants, as happened once when he was out collecting memory cards from camera traps.
“Our students are sought after—conservation organizations contact us wanting to hire them, which is
really cool,” Massad says. Graduates from Tenente’s
cohort are teaching at universities, working with international conservation organizations, or working as conservation scientists in other parks. Tenente would one
day like to get a doctoral degree, or to work at the intersection of conservation and community development.
Although the students take all their classes in the
park—and the park staff develops the curriculum with
Mozambican partners from all over the country, the
University of Lisbon in Portugal, and an international
volunteer faculty—the actual diploma comes from
Mozambican partners that are accredited universities.
The program itself recently received the highest level of
accreditation in Mozambique, even though its approach
of rigorous independent inquiry is fairly unique within
the country.
“I’m continually impressed with our students,” says
Massad. She has seen how the program builds confidence in students: Once they realize that they can pass
their classes and conduct successful research on their
own, they are much better prepared as independent
problem solvers. This, she says, is a great model for
training scientists across the African continent. “As
scientists and as leaders, they need to start thinking
and solving problems.”
He couldn’t have imagined any
of this as an undergrad, yet the
park now feels like home.
in gaps in fundamental understanding of ecosystems
and human communities. Many of the students are
also deepening the work they had begun as undergraduates. Elsa Candido Caetano, for example, studied
butterflies as an undergraduate biology student and
wanted to continue to learn about them. In Gorongosa, her research project uses butterflies as an indicator of restoration success on Mount Gorongosa,
a 6,112-foot inselberg that juts out from the rolling
plains of the park. “I want to answer the question:
How does the land use change affect the biodiversity
on the mountain?” she says.
Bal, the new director who took over from Massad
last spring, would like the program to expand into
researching the aquatic species and the water systems
of the park—areas that are “less investigated currently
in Gorongosa,” he says (Bal’s own doctoral work at the
University of Antwerp in Belgium was on the hydraulics
of aquatic vegetation).
Bal is excited to see the students engage with hardhitting science about less charismatic species, from
bats to plants and insects. Their topics echo a priority
of the park: to be a model of moving conservation work
on “forgotten taxa.”
Doing cutting-edge science can be challenging in a
remote place: One student, who is studying the ethnobotany of medicinal plants, needs to test if extracts of
the plants can kill off or inhibit the growth of bacteria
and fungi. To do that, he needs to get samples from
outside of Africa. “Everything takes time,” Bal says.
“I’m currently trying to expedite that process, so that
the student can do everything in time.”
Master’s program graduate Beto Tenente spent his
first year in the program during the coronavirus pandemic shutdown, partly studying from home, and partly
in the park for studies, surrounded by elephants and
antelopes. For his second-year research, Tenente used
Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa
Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and
parenting. You can find her on X (formerly known as Twitter)
@kategammon.
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