MARQUES ET AL.; AMPHIBIANS AND TERRESTRIAL REPTILES OF ANGOLA 
35 
As a part of the national plan to promote biodiversity research and conservation, the Ministry 
of Environment (MinAmb) in Angola in the late 2000s started to promote and organize biodiversi¬ 
ty assessments in different regions. In 2009, MinAmb in collaboration with the South African 
National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) organized a multidisciplinary expedition to Huila and 
Namibe provinces. While the majority of the results of this expedition remain unpublished, the 
material collected allowed the description of one new species of amphibian, Hyperolius chelaensis 
by Conradie et al. (2012a), and two new species of lizard, Pedioplanis haackei and Pedioplanis 
huntleyi by Conradie et al. (2012b). In the continuation of this project, MinAmb in collaboration 
with international partners conducted a rapid biodiversity assessment in April and May, 2011 to the 
area near Lagoa Carumbo (near Dundo) in Lunda Norte Province. The herpetological results of this 
assessment were published by Conradie et al. (2013), who described Hyperolius raymondi, and by 
Branch and Conradie (2015) who provided the first new records from this area since those from 
Laurent (1950a, 1954a, 1964a). The latter also included the first confirmed record of Naja (Boulen- 
gerind) annulata for Angola. 
Networking between national and international institutions has allowed the further increase of 
research activities in the country over the past decade. In 2013, a team from the Senckenberg 
Natural History Museum in Dresden, Germany participated in a multidisciplinary joint survey with 
the Universidade Kimpa Vita to Serra Pingano, Uige Province. This resulted in the first record of 
the anuran genus Trichobatrachus for Angola (Ernst et al. 2014). Other novelties await description 
and publication. As a part of a transnational survey of the Okavango Basin funded by National 
Geographic Society, the Okavango Wilderness Project (OWP) has been actively surveying the bio¬ 
diversity of the Cuando, Cuito, and Cubango river basins in Bie, Cuando Cubango, and Moxico 
provinces since 2012 (Branch 2018). The herpetological results of the different surveys made from 
2012-2015 were published by Conradie et al. (2016), which considerably expanded the known 
distribution of several amphibian and reptile taxa in Angola. In addition, they added new records 
for species previously unknown for Angola, including Causus cf rasmusseni Broadley, 2014, 
Acontias kgalagadi kgalagadi Lamb, Biswas and Bauer, 2010, and Panaspis maculicollis Jacobsen 
and Broadley 2000. A field report about part of the OWP herpetological research was recently 
published by Branch (2018). 
Since 2013, the Institute 
Nacional da Biodiversidade e 
Areas de Conservagao (INBAC) 
in Angola and the aforemen¬ 
tioned international partner insti¬ 
tutions have conducted herpeto¬ 
logical surveys in Iona National 
Park and Namibe Province 
in November/December 2013 
(results published by Ceriaco et 
al. 2016a and Stanley et al. 2016; 
Fig. 26), Cangandala National 
Park, Malanje Province in Sep¬ 
tember/October 2015 (results 
partly published in Ceriaco et al. 
2016b), Kwanza Sul and Ben- 
guela provinces in November/ 
December 2015 (results in prepa- 
Figure 26. Tissue sampling (Suzana Bandeira, at rear) and speeimen fix¬ 
ing (Luis Ceriaeo) in the field laboratory established in N’Dolondolo during 
2016 INBAC/VU expedition to Serra da Neve, Namibe Provinee (Photo by 
Ishan Agarwal). 
