Tracking the Naturalists

“Tracking the Naturalists – Mozambique” focuses on four of the most important ecosystems found in Mozambican territory: the mangrove, the seagrass meadows, the inselbergs, and the miombo woodlands. This exploration is lead by Dr. Jorge Paiva and retraces the movement of the 1963/64 Botanical Mission to Angola and Mozambique, promoted by the “Junta de Investigações do Ultramar.”

In 1927 Luís Wittnich Carisso, a botanist and professor from the University of Coimbra arrived in Angola to study its flora and collect plants for the Herbarium of Coimbra. In 1937 Luís Carrisso died in the Namibe desert, where 80 years before Frederico Welwitsch had found a plant unknown to science, the Welwitschia mirabilis. Some 80 years after the death of Carrisso, we retrace his journey with the goal of talking about the biodiversity of tropical plants and their ecological adaptations, from the tropical rainforest in northern Angola, to the Namibe desert in the south.

“Tracking the Naturalists – The Philosophical Journeys” frames the development of modern science in Portugal promoted by Marquis of Pombal, which resulted in the Portuguese philosophical expeditions of the late 18th century. Alongside the narration of science stories we embark on a voyage through the archives, the herbariums, and the methodologies used in the study of botany through time.

Fifteen million years ago a volcano eruption created a new island in the Atlantic Ocean above the Equator line. Little by little, a complex ecological system developed on it, the Tropical Rainforest. How did the plants arrive on the island? And how does this ecosystem work? A journey to São Tomé in search of the present, which retraces the botanical exploration of the island undertaken by the naturalist Frederico Moller in 1885.