Meet Dominique Gonçalves, a young elephant ecologist and insidenatgeo Explorer who is helping Gorongosa National Park transform itself into a “human rights park,” serving both wildlife and the people who live nearby
sits on over 4,000 square kilometers at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley in the heart of Mozambique. This “Serengeti of the south” is a complex ecosystem home to an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals. Critical to its health, the park has adopted a modern conservation model of balancing the needs of wildlife and people through conservation, community, science and sustainable tourism.
Dominique Gonçalves is one of the people leading this vital program. As manager of the park’s Elephant Ecology Project, she tracks nearly 500 majestic African elephants that roam the park, investigating their movements and range expansion. Just as important, she monitors human-elephant conflict in the buffer zone surrounding the park. At certain times of the year resources are especially scarce, bringing elephants and people into conflict.
“These are survivors,” Gonçalves says of the elephants living in Gorongosa today. “These are the ones who saw their families being slaughtered. Of course they are traumatized. They do not tolerate vehicles and our presence that well.” Despite this troubled history, Gonçalves is confident that elephants and humans will be able to peacefully coexist into the future.
“Coexistence takes time. It takes people to understand and it also takes elephants to understand,” she says. “I think the biggest thing that connects me with elephants is their empathy, their sense of place and family, it's very strong. They do anything to protect their family, especially the matriarchs and the females. They feel for the ones that are not there anymore. And they're able to forgive, maybe forget.
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