A Cyclone, a Flood, and a Very Big Park

When Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique in 2019, it slammed into Gorongosa National Park with 105-miles-per-hour winds and flooding that put at risk 200,000 people in its path. Immediately, the park leapt into action: Its rangers transformed into a rapid response team that rescued people in canoes and helicopters, and the park’s coffee factory became a food packing facility for emergency supplies, providing sustenance to more than 30,000 families weekly. 

Cyclone Idai—one of the deadliest on record in Africa to date—and the subsequent rising waters also had an immediate impact on wildlife in the 1 million-acre park, giving researchers all over the world the opportunity to study the cyclone’s effect on different species. The setup was fortuitous: In addition to being a safari destination, the park is essentially a massive science laboratory, with abundant cameras and animals wearing radio collars. Using the park’s camera grid and hourly pings from animal collars, researchers could watch in near-real time, from their labs thousands of miles away, as collared animals raced to avoid rising waters. In the cyclone’s aftermath, they could observe ways in which the park’s ecosystems responded to the cataclysm. 

Gorongosa sits at the southernmost edge of the Great Rift Valley, and