Living with Giants: Gorongosa Elephants’ Recovery and Challenges

2023 WINGS Flag Carrier Dr. Dominique Gonçalves is a Mozambican ecologist who manages the Gorongosa Elephant Ecology Project in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. She conducts a long-term monitoring of Gorongosa’s recovering elephant population looking on their habitat choices and its implications on human elephant conflict and coexistence. WINGS supported a critical component of Dominique’s assessment and monitoring of elephant populations in the Gorongosa National Park-Zambezi sector: the 99 active cameras distributed along the areas of high probability of elephants occurrence.

Dominique’s work is a holistic blend of ecology, behaviour and conservation, and focus on build coexistence between communities and elephants throughout a shared landscape. A passionate advocate of girls’ education to prevent early marriage, Gonçalves also supports the park’s Girls’ Club program through the role models initiative. Dominique has an M.Sc. in Conservation Biology and a Ph.D. in Biodiversity Management from the University of Kent’s Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology. Dominique was the narrator of award-winning film called “Our Gorongosa: a Park for the People”. She is a National Geographic Society Explorer and have featured in National Geographic Channel’s “Women of Impact” film. In 2020, she was nominated for the Pritzker Genius Award Prize, and she was one of the Explorers Club 50 people changing the world in 2021 and the Explorer’s Club New Explorer Awardee of 2023. In 2024 she was awarded the DICE-University of Kent’s Mike Walkey prize for best postgraduate student, and she is currently one of the Princeton University Presidential Postdoctoral Fellows.

Her talk, “Living with Giants: Gorongosa Elephants’ Recovery and Challenges” will take you through the fall and recovery of the elephant population, and its impacts in the social- ecological system of one of the most successful restoration efforts in Africa.