The Central African Plateau (CAP) covers a million square kilometers of African lithosphere absent of recent volcanism and intense seismicity. Treating the CAP erosion surface as a reference frame for measuring continental deformation reveals an active landscape of normal fault systems and crustal flexures. Free‐air gravity anomalies over the CAP reveal both a short‐wavelength (100–200 km) flexural and a longer‐wavelength (>500 km) mantle convective signature. Apatite fission track thermochronometry records the onset of regional cooling of the erosion surface below 60 °C between 38 and 22 Ma. The erosion surface was formed by the Latest Miocene and elevated to its present altitude (1,200 ± 50 m) in the Latest Miocene/Pliocene. High‐resolution Shuttle Radar Topography Mission‐ and LIDAR‐based digital elevation models of the erosion surface show active fault terraces and alluvial fan deformation associated with pre‐existing rift border faults. Flexural modeling of the footwall uplift of the Luangwa Rift border fault yields an effective elastic thickness of the CAP lithosphere of ~35 km. The rifting initiated in the Pliocene with, or soon after, elevation of the CAP. Subsequent Plio‐Pleistocene deformation of the CAP surface controls the Congo and Zambezi drainage systems and wetland locations. The CAP rifts link southwestward through the Zambezi, Kafue and Muchili Rifts to the Pleistocene aged Okavango and Eiseb Rifts of Botswana and Namibia, defining a propagating Southwestern Rift cutting the Nubian Plate. This active rift system developed along relatively thin (~150 km) lithosphere between the Congo and Kalahari cratons within crust inherited from Neoproterozoic collisional tectonics.

Landscape connectivity, the extent to which a landscape facilitates the flow of ecological processes such as organism movement, has emerged as a central focus of landscape ecology and conservation science. Connectivity modelling now encompasses an enormous body of work across ecological theory and application. The dominant connectivity models in use today are based on the framework of ‘landscape resistance’, which is a way of measuring how landscape structure influences movement patterns. However, the simplistic assumptions and high degree of reductionism inherent to the landscape resistance paradigm severely limits the ability of connectivity algorithms to account for many fundamental aspects of animal movement, and thus greatly reduces the effectiveness and relevance of connectivity models for conservation theory and practice. In this paper, we first provide an overview of the development of connectivity modelling and resistance surfaces. We then discuss several key drivers of animal movement which are absent in resistance-based models, with a focus on spatiotemporal variation, human and interspecies interactions, and other context-dependent effects. We look at a range of empirical studies which highlight the strong impact these effects have on movement and connectivity predictions. But we also provide promising avenues of future research to address this: we discuss newly emerging technologies and interdisciplinary work, and look to developing methodologies, models and conversations which move beyond the limiting framework of landscape resistance, so that connectivity models can better reflect the complexities and richness of animal movement.

Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman entanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis from which to articulate and critique digitally-mediated relations in diverse situated contexts. Three questions guide this approach: What digital technologies and infrastructures give rise to digital entanglement, and with what material consequences? What is at stake socially, politically, and economically when encounters with nonhumans are digitised? And how are digital technologies enrolled in programmes of environmental governance? We develop our digital ecologies framework across three core conceptual themes of wider interest to environmental geographers: (i) materialities, considering the infrastructures which enable digitally-mediated more-than-human connections and their socioenvironmental impacts; (ii) encounters, examining the political economic consequences and convivial potentials of digitising contact zones; (iii) governance, questioning how digital technologies produce novel forms of more-than-human governance. We affirm that digital mediations of more-than-human worlds can potentially cultivate environmentally progressive communities, convivial human–nonhuman encounters, and just forms of environmental governance, and as such note the urgency of these conversations.

Ecological collapse and the proliferation of digitally mediated relations are two conjoined elements of the ‘technonatural present’, which pose varied challenges and openings for the future of geographical thought and praxis beyond the delineated sub-disciplinary concerns of more-than-human and digital geographies. In this commentary, we draw attention to the inseparability, now and into the future, of geographical thought and praxis from digital mediation. This mediation is also central to forms of encounter, exploitation, and governance shaping human-nonhuman relations. Within this complex nexus of humans, nonhumans, environments, and technologies, it is crucial to critically examine how nature is made (mediated) and remade (remediated), by whom, for whom, and with whom. We call for research that affirmatively centres the potentials for progressive digitally-mediated environmentalisms, drawing from Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood's work on ‘glitch epistemologies’. To conclude, we point to a series of themes and questions that geographers might usefully engage with as they navigate digitally (re)mediated catastrophic times.

In 2021 and 2022, we engaged in a collaborative filmmaking project at Maple Farm, a rewilding site in Southeast England. The project resulted in After Wilding, a speculative documentary film that explores different perspectives on rewilding and the future of Maple Farm and natures in the United Kingdom more broadly. After Wilding envisions what it would be like to visit Maple Farm in June 2042; to do so, we used 360° imagery of the present site and computer-generated visualisations of possible future landscape features. These visualisations were underscored by three narrative vignettes reflecting on different interventions and perspectives on the site. This article describes creating After Wilding as a three-part process – attunement, perspectives and synthesis. We then reflect on the potential opportunities that digital technologies offer for collaborative speculations between researchers, artists and practitioners for geographical praxis and conservation activities.