Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Angola possesses an unusually rich diversity of ecosystems and species, but this natural wealth is poorly documented when compared with other countries in the region. Both colonial history and extended wars challenged progress in biodiversity research and conservation, but since peace was achieved in 2002 a rapidly increasing level of collaboration between Angolan and visiting scientists and institutions has seen a blossoming of biodiversity research. The absence of comprehensive reviews and syntheses of existing knowledge, often published in extinct journals and inaccessible official reports, necessitates a modern synthesis. This volume brings together the existing body of scientific results from studies on Angola’s landscapes, ecosystems, flora and fauna, and presents an outline of opportunities for biodiversity discovery, understanding and conservation as well as collaborative research.

Angola is a large country of 1,246,700 km on the southwest coast of Africa. The key features of the country’s diverse geomorphological, geological, pedological, climatic and biotic characteristics are presented. These range from the ultra-desert of the Namib, through arid savannas of the coastal plains to a biologically diverse transition up the steep western Angolan Escarpment. Congolian rainforests are found in Cabinda and along the northern border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, with outliers penetrating southwards along the Angolan Escarpment, or up the tributaries of the Congo Basin. Above the escarpment, high mountains rise to 2620 m above sea level, with isolated remnants of Afromontane forests and grasslands. Extensive miombo moist woodlands dominate the plateaus and peneplains of the Congo and Zambezi basins, and dry woodlands of / occur in the southeast towards the Cunene River, with woodlands dominating the Kalahari sands of the endorheic basins of the Cubango and Cuvelai rivers. Rainfall varies from lower than 20 mm per year in the southwest to over 1600 mm in the northwest and northeast. At a regional scale, Angola is notable for having representatives of seven of Africa’s nine biomes, and 15 of the continent’s ecoregions, placing Angola second only after South Africa for its diversity of African ecoregions.

Some major physical and oceanographic features of the Angolan marine system include a narrow continental shelf, the warm, southward flowing Angola Current, the plume of the Congo River in the north and the Angola-Benguela Front in the south. Depth, substrate types and latitude have been shown to account for species differences in demersal faunal assemblages including fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods. The extremely narrow shelf between Tômbwa (15°48′S) and Benguela (12°33′S) may serve as a barrier for the spreading of shelf-occurring species between the far south, which is influenced by the Angola-Benguela Front, and the equatorial waters of the central and northern areas. A similar pattern is evident for coastal and shallow-water species, including fishes, intertidal invertebrates and seaweeds, with species that have temperate affinities found in the far south and tropical species further to the north. In general the fauna and flora of the littoral zone appears to be consistent with a pattern of relatively low diversity of the shore and near-shore areas, that is characteristic of West Africa, but paucity of data for Angola may make such comparisons of diversity with other areas inappropriate at this stage. The Congo River delta and many features that are interspersed along the coast such as estuaries and associated floodplains, wetlands, lagoons, salt marshes and mangroves, support a rich suite of species, many of which are rare, endemic, migratory, and/or threatened, and provide important ecosystem services. While the ecological value of many areas or features is recognised, lack of any legal protection in the form of marine protected areas (MPAs) has been identified as one of the main challenges facing conservation and sustainable use of Angola’s marine and coastal biodiversity and habitats, in the face of multiple threats. A current process to identify and describe ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (EBSAs) could provide a foundation for designating some MPAs in future.

This chapter provides an overview of the alpha paleobiodiversity of Angola based on the available fossil record that is limited to the sedimentary rocks, ranging in age from Precambrian to the present. The geological period with the highest paleobiodiversity in the Angolan fossil record is the Cretaceous, with more than 80% of the total known fossil taxa, especially marine molluscs, including ammonites as a majority among them. The vertebrates represent about 15% of the known fauna and about one tenth of them are species firstly described based on specimens from Angola.

Angola is botanically rich and floristically diverse, but is still very unevenly explored with very few collections from the eastern half of the country. We present an overview of historical and current botanical activity in Angola, and point to some areas of future research. Approximately 6850 species are native to Angola and the level of endemism is around 14.8%. An additional 230 naturalised species have been recorded, four of which are regarded as highly invasive. We draw attention to the paucity of IUCN Red List assessments of extinction risk for Angolan vascular plants and note that the endemic aquatic genus (Podostemaceae), not currently assessed, is at high risk of extinction as a result of dams built on the Cuanza river for hydro-electric power generation. Recent initiatives to document areas of high conservation concern have added many new country and provincial records and are starting to fill geographic gaps in collections coverage.

Spatial information about plant species composition and the distribution of vegetation types is an essential baseline for natural resource management planning. In Angola, the first countrywide vegetation map was elaborated by Gossweiler in 1939. Subsequently, Barbosa published a revised map with much higher detail in 1970 and his work has remained the main reference for the vegetation of Angola until today. However, these early maps were expert drawn and were not based on systematic surveys. Instead, the delimitation of vegetation units was based on many years of field observations and also incorporated results of local studies carried out by other authors. In spite the rich history of the scientific exploration of Angola’s vegetation in colonial times, quantitative and plot based studies were rare. After the end of the armed conflict, new vegetation surveys making use of new methodological developments in numerical approaches to vegetation classification in combination with modern remote sensing imagery have provided spatial information of unprecedented detail. However, vast areas of the country still remain seriously understudied. At the same time, sustainable land management strategies are urgently needed due to the increasing pressure on natural resources driven by socio-economic development and global change, thus calling for a new era of vegetation surveys that will enable data-based landuse and conservation planning in Angola.

A small-scale mosaic of miombo woodlands and open, seasonally inundated grasslands is a typical aspect of the Zambezian phytochorion that extends into the eastern and central parts of Angola. The grasslands are home to so-called ‘underground trees’ or , a life form with massive underground wooden structures. Some (but not all) of the occur also in open woodland types. These iconic dwarf shrubs evolved in many plant families under similar environmental pressures, converting the Zambezian phytochorion into a unique evolutionary laboratory. In this chapter we assemble the current knowledge on distribution, diversity, ecology and evolutionary history of geoxylic suffrutices and suffrutex-grasslands in Angola and highlight their conservation values and challenges.

Landscape changes in Angola are dominated by woodland and forest losses due to clearing for crops, bush fires (which convert woodland into shrubland) and the harvesting of fuel (as wood and charcoal) and timber. Rates of clearing for small-scale dryland crops are high over much of Angola as a result of poor soil fertility. Erosion is also a severe problem, which has caused widespread losses of topsoil, soils nutrients and ground water. Rates of erosion are greatest in areas with steep slopes, sparse plant cover and high numbers of people, as well as around diamond mines in Lunda-Norte. Patterns of river flow and water quality have been changed, largely as a result of soil erosion and plant cover loss, as well as large irrigation schemes and dams. High rates of urban growth and the production of untreated urban waste have led to large concentrations of contamination around towns. Further research is needed, for example to assess the environmental impacts of the fishing and petroleum industries offshore, the effects of large volumes of urban waste being washed into and down major rivers to the sea, and landscape changes in an around areas of highland forests and grasslands that support populations of rare and endemic species.

Prior to 2012, only 158 species of Odonata were known from Angola. Surveys in 2012 and 2013 added 76 species and further additions in 2016 brought the national total to 236 species. This was published earlier in 2017 as the checklist of the dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) of Angola by the same authors (Kipping et al. Afr Invertebr 58 (I):65–91. , ) on which this chapter is based. Records obtained in 2017 and 2018 and a survey by two of the authors in December 2017 led to the discovery of 25 additional species, of which several are undescribed. We provide a revised checklist here comprising 260 species and discuss the history of research, the biogeography of the fauna with endemism and the potential for further discoveries. The national total is likely to be above 300 species. This would make Angola one of the richest countries for Odonata in Africa.

Presently, 792 species/subspecies of butterflies and skippers (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) are known from Angola, a country with a rich diversity of habitats, but where extensive areas remain unsurveyed and where systematic collecting programmes have not been undertaken. Only three species were known from Angola in 1820. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, many new species have been described and more than 220 faunistic novelties have been assigned. As a whole, of the 792 taxa now listed for Angola, 57 species/subspecies are endemic and almost the same number are known to be near-endemics, shared by Angola and by one or another neighbouring country. The Nymphalidae are the most diverse family. The Lycaenidae and Papilionidae have the highest levels of endemism. A revised checklist with taxonomic and ecological notes is presented and the development of knowledge of the superfamily over time in Angola is analysed.