A major survey of Angola’s remote Lisima plateau has uncovered species unknown to science, including new dragonflies, grasshoppers, moths and butterflies, confirming the highlands as one of Africa’s most exciting biodiversity frontiers.
High on Angola’s eastern plateau, in Moxico Province, lies one of Africa’s great almost-unknown treasures: the Angolan Highlands Water Tower.
It’s a vast upland landscape of miombo woodlands, wetlands, grasslands, sandy soils and source lakes, where water begins journeys that shape life across much of southern and central Africa.
From here, rivers flow into the Congo, Okavango, Zambezi and Cuanza systems, sustaining ecosystems and communities thousands of kilometres downstream, including Botswana’s legendary Okavango Delta.
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For a place so important, it has remained astonishingly little known. Angola’s long civil war, persistent landmines, remoteness and difficult access kept scientists away for decades.
While the Okavango Delta became a global conservation icon, many of the highland headwaters that feed it stayed almost blank on the biological map.
That is now changing fast.
In February 2026, a team of 16 African and international specialists travelled to the remote Lisima plateau for the Cassai Life Atlas, a biodiversity survey conducted by The Wilderness Project. Supported by Fundação Lisima and The HALO Trust, the expedition set out to document life in the upper Cassai catchment, one of the least-studied parts of the Angolan Highlands Water Tower.
“Being on the ground in a place like this,…