A serious survey of Angola’s distant Lisima plateau has uncovered species unknown to science, together with new dragonflies, grasshoppers, moths and butterflies, confirming the highlands as considered one of Africa’s most fun biodiversity frontiers.
Excessive on Angola’s japanese plateau, in Moxico Province, lies considered one of Africa’s nice almost-unknown treasures: the Angolan Highlands Water Tower.
It is a huge upland panorama of miombo woodlands, wetlands, grasslands, sandy soils and supply lakes, the place water begins journeys that form life throughout a lot of southern and central Africa.
From right here, rivers circulate into the Congo, Okavango, Zambezi and Cuanza programs, sustaining ecosystems and communities hundreds of kilometres downstream, together with Botswana’s legendary Okavango Delta.
Sustain with the most recent headlines on WhatsApp | LinkedIn
For a spot so necessary, it has remained astonishingly little recognized. Angola’s lengthy civil battle, persistent landmines, remoteness and troublesome entry stored scientists away for many years.
Whereas the Okavango Delta turned a worldwide conservation icon, lots of the highland headwaters that feed it stayed virtually clean on the organic map.
That’s now altering quick.
In February 2026, a group of 16 African and worldwide specialists travelled to the distant Lisima plateau for the Cassai Life Atlas, a biodiversity survey performed by The Wilderness Undertaking. Supported by Fundação Lisima and The HALO Belief, the expedition got down to doc life within the higher Cassai catchment, one of many least-studied components of the Angolan Highlands Water Tower.
“Being on the bottom in a spot like this,…