KAFUE NATIONAL PARK, Zambia — At a bend in Zambia’s Kafue River, the bicolored waterberry trees resemble an avenue planted along a city boulevard. Their evergreen crowns stretch as far as the eye can see, reflected in the still, glassy water, only broken by the surfacing of two curious hippos. These trees — Syzygium guineense subsp. barotsense — are a dominant feature of this stretch of river, yet their role in maintaining river ecology is only just beginning to be understood. During a recent 300-kilometer (186-mile) canoe expedition through Kafue National Park, Mongabay joined The Wilderness Project (TWP) — a group of researchers and explorers gathering data on Africa’s major rivers and their basins — to document the Kafue River’s biodiversity and human impact along its course. On one island, shortly after the river crosses the northern boundary of the park, the team encountered the fantastical, deeply fluted trunks of waterberry trees, the soil at their bases threaded with the spoor of African clawless otters (Aonyx capensis). Further downstream, dozens of white-breasted cormorants (Phalacrocorax lucidus) burst from nests wedged into branches of a small copse of waterberries growing directly in the river’s current. Bicolored waterberry roots clasping rocks in the middle of the river channel. Image by Ryan Truscott for Mongabay. The Wilderness Project team stops to conduct research on the island, surrounded by the waterberry trees’ fluted trunks. Image by Ryan Truscott for Mongabay. Known for fruits that sometimes emerge half-white, half-purple, the bicolored waterberry is one of several…This article was originally published on Mongabay