@jasperdoest

A selection of the fruits and seeds found in Lopé National Park and photographed in the studio setup I installed at the park’s research station. Fruit is a keystone resource for many of the African megafauna. In 2016, Emma Bush, a doctorate student at Stirling University @stirlingunifc started to analyse the fruiting dataset after which she and her team published an alarming paper in @sciencemagazine, that showed that it is likely that climate changes experienced Lopé have caused a staggering 80% decrease in fruit production. To understand the implications for the forest and the megafauna it sustains, National Geographic Editor at Large @kurtmutchler asked me to travel to Gabon in October to document the fruit, the forest and its forest elephants. The story is currently published in the May edition of the magazine which is a special issue dedicated to the state of the world’s forests.