A trip to Angola 13 years ago...
It seems like a long time ago when in January 2009 we set off up the N7 through Namibia to Angola to join a SANBI expedition to the southern highlands of Angola and Iona National Park. Our team on reptiles and amphibians consisted of Krystal Tolley and myself (then from SANBI) and Bill Branch and Werner Conradie (from BayWorld). We were just one component of many teams from different disciplines that joined forces to inventory the biodiversity of southern Angola.
As time has gone by, there have been many more trips to Angola with many more people involved. Together, all of this data represents an important resource, and has now been written up as an updated herpetofaunal inventory for Iona National Park by Javier Lobón-Rovira and colleagues, and published in the journal Check List.
With 5 amphibians (the park is essentially a desert) and 70 reptile species, the new check list records 40 of these for the first time in Iona National Park. This is a remarkable achievement.
Read the full paper Open Access here.
Lobón-Rovira J, Vaz Pinto P, S. Becker F, Tolley KA, Measey J, Bennet B, Boon B, de Sá S, Conradie W (2022) An updated herpetofaunal species inventory of Iona National Park in southwestern Angola. Check List 18(2): 289-321. https://doi.org/10.15560/18.2.289
