African Wildlife & Environment Issue 81

SPECIAL BOOK REVIEW

Peer recognition of Montane to Mangrove Since its release Montane to Mangrove has been widely acclaimed for its contribution to the management of conservation areas - worldwide. Prof Rob Pringle of Princeton University, USA

northernmost mountains are at long last putting northern Mozambique at the front of African ecology, zoogeography and general biology, and the Gorongosa monograph will boost it tremendously” Dr Othman Llewellyn of the Saudi Arabia Wildlife Authority remembers Tinley’s work in Saudi Arabia in 2010 saying that “I will always treasure his mentoring during those weeks that we travelled together - he is one of my leading heroes in the quest to understand the land and care for it, and I am truly grateful for the short time I had him as a mentor in the mountains and deserts of Arabia. I have never met anyone who, after a day or less on a new site, could so brilliantly sum up the natural processes shaping it, as Ken has done.” Bookending with Kaleidoscope As the first opening sentence of his Introduction to Montane to Mangrove Ken Tinley writes: “A holistic evolutionary approach is used in the Gorongosa thesis in which emphasis is on the salient reciprocal relations and kinetic succession of land surfaces and biotic communities, influenced by landscape processes and prime mover components.” Simply stating in one sentence the purpose of the book is towards an understanding of Gorongosa’s ecology. Not surprising therefore that in 'Kaleidoscope', the last section of the book, Ken again reminds the reader of the book’s purpose. Only this time he uses the image of a kaleidoscope to re-state it. “Kaleidoscope, used here in an ecosystem context, is made up totally of moving parts: the two rotatable pieces of the tube comprising (a) climatic controls (particularly of precipitation in the tropics), and (b) the edaphic or substrate control. Within this tube are the coloured chips which represent the living components that form different patterns of recombination with every movement of either one or both the tube parts, as well as adjustments from their own interactions. Amongst the chips are some brighter than others, which represent the prime mover components or dominants, their brightness altering in each adjustment where others become dominant.”

LEFt: Figure 1.1

the regional landscape of the Gorongosa- Marromeu conservation area.

1.2 FORM, CLIMATE, COVER The build of the Gorongosa region is dominated by the Rift Valley trough, whose alluvial floor averages 40 km in width and lies between 15 and 80 m above sea level. The centripetal drainage of the Rift floor is collected by the Urema Lake which forms the lowest part and as the basin Salient Landscape Features: Tinley’s hand-drawn depiction and analysis of the Gorongosa ecosystem is partially endoreic it is the effective local drainage base level. When filled, the basin discharges to the Pungue River which forms the southern boundary of the park. The upper edges of the trough rise obliquely to form the Cheringoma Plateau (300 m) on its eastern side, and the deeply incised Báruè Midlands (400 m) on its western side. Perched on the western Midlands within 21 km of the trough is Gorongosa Mountain which is 20 by 30 km in size and attains 1,863 m at its highest point (Fig. 1.2).

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writes: "The scientific value of Tinley’s thesis is immense, as it provides essentially the only ecological baseline data for what has become the world’s flagship restoration effort. And it would be hard to overstate how impressive the work is, because it was basically a de novo synthesis from scratch of the ecology and geomorphology of the total system. I don’t really know of anything else like it. There are very few people I can name who have such an innate talent for ecology - the ability to walk into a place and deduce how it works. I could really only name one other person I’ve met who has made that impression on me, although there are a few folks long since passed who are reputed to have had the gift. "Ken Tinley’s DSc thesis is a masterpiece.Again and again, I revisit it and am just awestruck by how much he perceived, and how much he was able to record, and I compare that with what I see from DScs these days, and it’s not in the same ballpark. Not even the same sport.” Dr John Poynton, Zoologist of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg writes: “This is magnificent work. It will become a landmark in the - fortunately - developing biology of Mozambique. A lot of new data on the

65 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 81 (2022)