For decades, the Lisima Plateau in eastern Angola was effectively erased from the scientific map — cut off first by civil war, then by the landmines it left behind. In February, a team of 16 African and international researchers finally reached it, and what they found has added dozens of species to the tree of life.
The expedition, called the Cassai Life Atlas and led by The Wilderness Project with support from Fundação Lisima and The HALO Trust, catalogued 103 dragonfly and damselfly species alone — eight of them entirely new to science, plus 34 species never before recorded in the area and six additions to Angola's national species list. Surveys of grasshoppers, katydids and crickets turned up three new species among 47 taxa, and more than 1,000 recorded butterflies and moths yielded roughly 60 newcomers to the scientific record.
A "complex transition zone"
The plateau's biology surprised even the scientists who planned the trip. Expedition leader Rob Taylor said the standout discovery wasn't any single new species but the ecosystem itself.
The most surprising finding was the strong Congolian forest influence in the upper Cassai catchment.
Rob Taylor, Cassai Life Atlas expedition leader
Rather than the miombo woodland researchers expected, the team documented a "complex transition zone" — humid highland forest and swamp and peat wetlands feeding directly into it. Beyond the insects, surveyors logged 24 amphibian and 23 reptile species, including Gaboon adders, bush vipers and cobras, plus fluorescent blue-marked spiders, palm-sized fruit beetles, roosting bats in limestone caves and more than 320 plant collections.
The stakes go well beyond a tally of new Latin names. The Lisima Plateau sits atop the Angolan Highlands Water Tower, source of four major river systems — the Congo, Zambezi, Cuanza and Okavango — that sustain ecosystems and millions of people thousands of kilometers downstream, including the UNESCO-listed Okavango Delta in Botswana. Its swamp forests and peatlands also lock away significant stores of carbon.
That water tower is now facing renewed pressure. Researchers warn that mining interest and clear-felling are creeping into a landscape that, until very recently, was too dangerous even to walk through — let alone map.
