Mar 19, 2024 |
A group of Mozambican and international scientists are proposing the designation of a new African "ecoregion", made up of an "inland archipelago" of 30 isolated mountains, some harbouring unique animals and plants found nowhere else on Earth.
The South East African Mountain Archipelago covers southern Malawi and northern Mozambique. This geographical isolation has fuelled the evolution of separate species within the forests that grow on them, and these forests could be protected.
This new ecoregion is a chain of hard granite inselbergs elevated above the surrounding landscape formed as it eroded over millions of years. These "sky islands", as they are also known, are covered in high-altitude grasslands and evergreen forests watered by cool, moist winds from the Indian Ocean to the east.
According to Mongabay reports, a group of researchers is now advocating the declaration of a new "ecoregion" that will strengthen the protection of these inselbergs, whose patches of forest, once thought to be connected to those of Central Africa, still harbour unique communities of animals and plants. The defence of this solution was originally published in the scientific journal Nature..
Researcher Julian Bayliss, who has discovered unique ecosystems for science such as Mount Mabu and Mount Lico, located in Zambezia, has also discovered several new species that until now had never been identified and classified by the scientific community. This is the case of the Mabu Wood Viper (Atheris mabuensis) in honour of the mountain where it was found. Half a dozen species of pygmy chameleons of the genus Rhampholeon have been discovered that persist only on separate mountains within the ecoregion to be designated. Mount Mabu has its own, as do Mounts Namuli and Inago to the north-east, Mount Chiperone to the south-west and Mount Mulanje in Malawi and the Malawi Hills. These are some of the discoveries that Bayliss has documented over 20 years of the rich biodiversity of plants and animals in this region.
This position of creating a transboundary ecoregion is defended by Julian Bayliss and 25 other colleagues he has worked with, who propose that Mabu and the other 30 or so mountains in this biological treasure trove be declared a South East African Mountain Archipelago (SEAMA) - to support conservation initiatives in this area.
Among the researchers are Mozambicans Harith Farooq, from the Lúrio University (Pemba), the University of Copenhagen and the Herbarium, Instituto de Investigaçao Agrária de Moçambique and WCS (Maputo), José Monteiro, from the Rede Para Gestão Comunitária de Recursos Naturais, ReGeCom (Maputo), and Érica Tovela, from the Natural History Museum (Maputo).
“Instead of single-site [conservation] initiatives you can now have ecoregion-wide conservation initiatives targeting many of the sites with a recognized identity, similar to the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania or the Albertine Rift ecoregion [in East Africa],” says Bayliss, the lead author of the new study. SEAMA has higher levels of reptile endemism, or unique reptile species, than the Albertine Rif ecoregion, Bayliss notes.
The new study shows that since 2000, SEAMA is estimated to have lost 18 per cent of its primary wet forest cover and up to 43 per cent in some individual sites, although even this is considered an underestimate. The data used in the study only deals with the loss of primary rainforest.
Photos: Mongabay e The Guardian
Map: Nature
Featured photo: Mount Mabu Pygmy Chameleon (Rhampholeon maspictus)
Mount Mabu forest viper (Atheris mabuensis) (Mongabay/Sibmoz).Sibmoz).
Ernesto André, Ofélio Cavalleo, Bartolomeu Ofélio and Lopes André knew the mountain long before Julian Bayliss and his team arrived. They grew up there, hiding from the war with their parents. Today they live on the edge of the forest and their way of life is changing. By switching from hunting to guiding, they hope to bring more visitors to their old home and share the magic of their mountain with the world (The Guardian).
Epamera malaikae (Mongabay/Colin Congdon).
