NDLI: Large-scale impacts of herbivores on the structural diversity of African savannas

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Asner, Gregory P. Levick, Shaun R. Ty, Kennedy-bowdoin Knapp, David E. Emerson, Ruth Jacobson, James Colgan, Matthew S. Martin, Roberta E.
Abstract	African savannas are undergoing management intensification, and decision makers are increasingly challenged to balance the needs of large herbivore populations with the maintenance of vegetation and ecosystem diversity. Ensuring the sustainability of Africa's natural protected areas requires information on the efficacy of management decisions at large spatial scales, but often neither experimental treatments nor large-scale responses are available for analysis. Using a new airborne remote sensing system, we mapped the three-dimensional (3-D) structure of vegetation at a spatial resolution of 56 cm throughout 1640 ha of savanna after 6-, 22-, 35-, and 41-year exclusions of herbivores, as well as in unprotected areas, across Kruger National Park in South Africa. Areas in which herbivores were excluded over the short term (6 years) contained 38%–80% less bare ground compared with those that were exposed to mammalian herbivory. In the longer-term (> 22 years), the 3-D structure of woody vegetation differed significantly between protected and accessible landscapes, with up to 11-fold greater woody canopy cover in the areas without herbivores. Our maps revealed 2 scales of ecosystem response to herbivore consumption, one broadly mediated by geologic substrate and the other mediated by hillslope-scale variation in soil nutrient availability and moisture conditions. Our results are the first to quantitatively illustrate the extent to which herbivores can affect the 3-D structural diversity of vegetation across large savanna landscapes.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810637106
Starting Page	4947
File Format	PDF
ISSN	10916490
e-ISSN	10916490
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Issue Number	12
Volume Number	106
Language	English
Publisher	National Academy of Sciences
Publisher Date	2009-03-24
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	National Academy of Sciences
Subject Keyword	Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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