The Blue Future Project, led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Mozambique in partnership with national institutions and, with financial support from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), through its Our Sea Our Life Project, concluded in September its fifth scientific expedition with the aim of strengthening the mapping and monitoring of marine ecosystems along the northern coast of Nampula province.
Between Simuco, Memba district, and Mongicual, Mossuril district, the team of researchers reassessed 20 previously studied coral reefs and expanded the surveys to areas not yet explored, namely the area between Lunga Bay and Mongicual.
The expedition made it possible to map habitats through underwater cameras and remotely operated vehicles (ROV) at 48 sampling points, establish six new coral reef monitoring stations, collect quantitative data on reef extent, benthic cover, fish biomass and marine diversity.
Previous campaigns, carried out between 2022 and 2024, covered around 260 km of coastline, from the Lúrio River to Lunga Bay, including 59 coral reefs, 340 monitoring points with Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV), underwater video cameras and about 1,000 validation sites using Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV). Because of this new campaign, the project’s study area now covers more than 300 km of coastline, 66 coral reefs and more than 1000 ecosystem mapping points and allowed to obtain ecological change data on 20 reefs sampled successively in 2022 and 2025. The data was incorporated into the global Marine Ecological Research Management AID (MERMAID) platform, dedicated to the study of coral reefs.
This fifth expedition took place in two phases: the first in the district of Mossuril, with the support of the sailboat S/Y Antsiva, which served as a floating base and diving platform and the second in the district of Memba, from Nuarro Lodge, using the facilities and boats of the local diving center.
The multidisciplinary team was composed of Erwan Sola, Celina Lupaka and Jorge Sitoe from WCS Mozambique, Rosário Viadora from the Oceanographic Institute of Mozambique (InOM), Isabel Marques da Silva, Samuel Omar and Ildefonso Monteiro from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Lúrio University in Pemba (FCN-UniLúrio).
With this joint effort, WCS Mozambique Marine Program through the Blue Future Project funded by Blue Action, carried out this activity with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, reinforcing the scientific knowledge base on the current state of coral reefs and consolidating the conditions for effective management and conservation of marine ecosystems in Mozambique.
