ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Evolution of human-driven fire regimes in Africa.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dual-Locus Metabarcoding Reveals Dry-Season Dietary Differentiation Between Elephants and Impalas in a South African Savanna.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Spatial modeling of forest-savanna bistability: impacts of fire dynamics and timescale separation.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Congo Basin Carbon Cycle Responses to Global Change.Global change biology · 2026Review
- The fire regimes of the Cerrado and their changes through time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Future climate-driven fires may boost ocean productivity in the iron-limited North Atlantic.Nature climate change · 2025Article
- Seasonal spatial-temporal trends of vegetation recovery in burned areas across Africa.PloS one · 2025Article
- Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Floristic diversity and its relationships with human land use varied regionally during the Holocene.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Anthropogenic warming is a key climate indicator of rising urban fire activity in China.National science review · 2024Article
- Spread of the cycles: a feedback perspective on the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Quantifying the environmental limits to fire spread in grassy ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The policy consequences of defining rewilding.Ambio · 2022Article
- Article
- Multidecadal effects of fire in a grassland biodiversity hotspot: Does pyrodiversity enhance plant diversity?Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2021Article
- Fire-derived phosphorus fertilization of African tropical forests.Nature communications · 2021Article
- A Bi-Spectral Microbolometer Sensor for Wildfire Measurement.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Article
- Anthropogenic modifications to fire regimes in the wider Serengeti-Mara ecosystem.Global change biology · 2019Article
- Ecology of a widespread large omnivore,Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Palaeo-trajectories of forest savannization in the southern Congo.Biology letters · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human ability to manipulate fire and the landscape has increased over evolutionary time, but the impact of this on fire regimes and consequences for biodiversity and biogeochemistry are hotly debated. Reconstructing historical changes in human-derived fire regimes empirically is challenging, but information is available on the timing of key human innovations and on current human impacts on fire; here we incorporate this knowledge into a spatially explicit fire propagation model. We explore how changes in population density, the ability to create fire, and the expansion of agropastoralism altered the extent and seasonal distribution of fire as modern humans arose and spread through Africa. Much emphasis has been placed on the positive effect of population density on ignition frequency, but our model suggests this is less important than changes in fire spread and connectivity that would have occurred as humans learned to light fires in the dry season and to transform the landscape through grazing and cultivation. Different landscapes show different limitations; we show that substantial human impacts on burned area would only have started ~4,000 B.P. in open landscapes, whereas they could have altered fire regimes in closed/dissected landscapes by ~40,000 B.P. Dry season fires have been the norm for the past 200-300 ky across all landscapes. The annual area burned in Africa probably peaked between 4 and 40 kya. These results agree with recent paleocarbon studies that suggest that the biomass burned today is less than in the recent past in subtropical countries.
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