Discovering the Cubango-Okavango river basin. A geomorphological description of the Angolan rivers and its fish assemblages and the ecological implications of future human development

• Autor(es): Preiswerk, Sebastian Benedikt Coimbra
• Data: 2013
• Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/6488
• Origem: Repositório da UTL
• Assunto(s): Cubango-Okavango; geomorphologic; fish; zonation; connectivity
• Tipo de Documento: Dissertação de mestrado
• Idioma: Inglês
• Orientador(es): Cardoso, Maria Teresa Ferreira da Cunha
• Contribuidor(es): Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa

Descrição

Mestrado em Engenharia Florestal e dos Recursos Naturais - Instituto Superior de Agronomia

The years fly by but the African continet and its enourmos richness remains an undiscovered treasure. The Angolan province Cuando-Cubango includes one of the biggest watersheds of the African continent, the Cubango-Okavango river basin. One of the rivers where most parts remains untouched and in a pristine form. Ongoing water resources planning intends to regulate large parts of the basin and to intensify human uses. In order to better understand and to analize ecological responses of the Angolan part of this river basin, three main steps were conducted: The first one was to develop and to validate a geomorphological zonation in order to understand the evolution and the main characteristics of river planforms. In second place, the different fish species that inhabit the main water courses where taken into account and a fish zonation was designed for the entire watershed in order to establish biological responses based on the species’s needs and their connectivity dependence. The projected dams’ construction for the different rivers was analized and their impacts on the species movements and habitat exploitation were desmasked in order to understand the ecological implications of this constructions for the watershed enviroment.