Gorongosa National Park’s Astonishing Comeback
Marc Stalmans, the director of science at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, has been walking the vast Gorongosa National Park for 17 years. However, he still gets a kick out of the potato bush, Phyllanthus reticulatus. Every time he walks by the plant in the early evenings and gets a whiff of the plant’s uncanny smell, which is very close to the actual smell of mashed potatoes, it makes him smile—and he gets a little hungry. He says this smell is not pervasive in the environment, but it is a characteristic scent of Gorongosa.
He’s out in the bush to ensure the continuous recovery of its wildlife and infrastructure. The park had been devastated during the country’s civil war (1977-1992), when soldiers lived there and killed most of the animals. In 2004, Greg Carr and the Carr Foundation formed the Gorongosa Restoration Project non-profit organization in a public-private partnership with the Mozambican government to rehabilitate, expand, and co-manage the park. It was two years later that Stalmans, who earned a master’s in botany and a Ph.D. in landscape ecology from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, began consulting with them, until he joined full time in 2012. These years of critical
