BBC Rain Forest Science — Five years ago, few knew there was a forest here. Its discovery by the scientific community is down to a very 21st-Century research tool.
“I used Google Earth to locate all the mountains over 1,500m that were closest to Mount Mulanje in Southern Malawi,” Dr Julian Bayliss, head of the cross-border conservation project, told me. “Mount Mabu was selected through Google Earth as one of these sights.”
Dr Bayliss’s project, funded through a British scheme called the Darwin Initiative, looked for similarities between different patches of medium altitude rainforest. When images of Mount Mabu were analysed, it became clear that there was a large patch of dark green of which there was no official record. A quickly arranged visit to northern Mozambique confirmed what Dr Bayliss had suspected.
“It was at that stage I realised that we were dealing with what looks like the biggest rainforest in Southern Africa,” he said. Travelling with Dr Bayliss and a team of scientists on to Mabu, I saw what had so excited them. Unlike most of the forests in southern Africa there was no sign of any logging or burning having taken place. The 7,000 hectares of Mount Mabu are in pristine condition.
“This is an island of evergreen forest in a sea of savannah,” Professor Branch said. What that means is that the animals inside Mabu have had very little interaction with other groups of forest dwellers. …
That now translates into many of the species being new to science.
Declaring a new species is a process fraught with the fear of being proved wrong. But Mabu’s scientists are quietly confident that, in the last year, they have found more than 10 new species. “Whatever we see we pick up, and there’s a high probability that it’s going to be a new species,” Dr Bayliss said.
His own specific passion is butterflies. I watched his eclectic team, which included a 75-year-old enthusiast, as they scoured the forest canopy for new discoveries. They weren’t disappointed. Four new butterflies are set to be confirmed, with one of them likely to bear Dr Bayliss’s name. (06/12/09)