ABOVE: Coffee plantations represent just one type of land use on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.
ANTONIA MAYR
In recounting his journeys to Mount Kilimanjaro, ecologist Marcell Peters remembers how difficult it was to breathe at more than 3,500 meters above sea level. Up in the subalpine forests on the upper flanks of Africa’s highest mountain, with a pinnacle that reaches nearly six kilometers above sea level, the air gets thin, and hiking, let alone conducting an ecological study, can be exhausting, says Peters, a researcher at the University of Würzburg in Germany.
Yet the mountain’s ecology was exactly why Peters undertook the six-day trek on multiple occasions between 2011 and 2016. He, fellow Würzburg ecologist Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, and a team of nearly 50 other scientists from Europe and Africa collectively made hundreds of trips up Kilimanjaro during that period in an effort to survey the mountain’s animals, plants, insects, and ...
