Shifting ecotones on the African continent: a pollen-based review of vegetation change since the Last glacial maximum
Ms Leanne Phelps1, Dr Manuel Chevalier1, Dr Chris Kiahtipes, Dr Lynne Quick, Dr Basil Davis1, Dr Olivier Broennimann1, Dr Antoine Guisan1
1University of Lausanne, Grandvaux, Switzerland
Biodiversity hotspots are prominent across African, and their conservation value is widely acknowledged. However, past interactions between land cover, climate change, and disturbance dynamics – all of which inform future scenarios of vegetation change – are poorly understood, and this leads to highly variable predictions of biodiversity and ecosystem change. Therefore, past vegetation dynamics requires further clarification, and we aim to address this in two ways: first, by applying niche-based methods to fossil pollen taxa, we reconstruct changes in the relationship between select land cover categories (forest, savanna, and steppe) and climate change since the last glacial maximum, and map vegetation at 100-year intervals. Second, we investigate variation in the spatial and temporal relationship between forest and savanna, in order to shed light on disturbance dynamics and to focus attention on these often neglected ecotones, which are likely to provide underestimated sources of biodiversity.
Biography:
Leanne Phelps is a PhD student at the University of Lausanne, where she works on reconstructing Holocene land use and land cover change on the African continent, by applying methods from spatial ecology to palaeoecological and archaeological data.