ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Many shades of green: the dynamic tropical forest-savannah transition zones.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Forest islands sustain more temporally stable insect metacommunities in a heterogeneous tropical mountaintop landscape.npj biodiversity · 2026Article
- Drivers of understory shrub and herb biomass in subtropical Chinese fir forests: a cluster analysis and SEM approach.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Deciphering fire tolerance of trees at the Amazonia-Cerrado transition by trait-based approach: Implications from species to communities.American journal of botany · 2025Article
- Woody and Herbaceous Species Diversity Respond Differently to Environmental Variables in Semiarid Areas in Ghana.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Interactions between soil and other environmental variables modulate forest expansion and ecotone dynamics in humid savannas of Central Africa.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Ecotones as Windows into Organismal-to-Biome Scale Responses across Neotropical Forests.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Seasonal flooding shapes forest-savanna transitions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Double stress of waterlogging and drought drives forest-savanna coexistence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The emergence of scale-free fires in Australia.iScience · 2023Article
- Ecosystem Microbiome Science.mLife · 2023Article
- Abrupt loss and uncertain recovery from fires of Amazon forests under low climate mitigation scenarios.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Assimilatory deficit and energy regulation in young Handroanthus chrysotrichus plants under flooding stress.Journal of plant research · 2022Article
- Mapping native and non-native vegetation in the Brazilian Cerrado using freely available satellite products.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Reducing the arbitrary: fuzzy detection of microbial ecotones and ecosystems - focus on the pelagic environment.Environmental microbiome · 2020Article
- Bamboo, climate change and forest use: A critical combination for southwestern Amazonian forests?Ambio · 2020Article
- Grass and tree cover responses to intra-seasonal rainfall variability vary along a rainfall gradient in African tropical grassy biomes.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Measuring resilience and assessing vulnerability of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change in South America.PloS one · 2018Article
- The biodiversity cost of carbon sequestration in tropical savanna.Science advances · 2017Article
- Aridity and hominin environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Amazonian forest-savanna bistability and human impact.Nature communications · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The forest-savannah transition is the most widespread ecotone in tropical areas, separating two of the most productive terrestrial ecosystems. Here, we review current understanding of the factors that shape this transition, and how it may change under various drivers of local or global change. At broadest scales, the location of the transition is shaped by water availability, mediated strongly at local scales by fire regimes, herbivory pressure and spatial variation in soil properties. The frequently dynamic nature of this transition suggests that forest and savannah can exist as alternative stable states, maintained and separated by fire-grass feedbacks and tree shade-fire suppression feedback. However, this theory is still contested and the relative contributions of the main biotic and abiotic drivers and their interactions are yet not fully understood. These drivers interplay with a wide range of ecological processes and attributes at the global, continental, regional and local scales. The evolutionary history of the biotic and abiotic drivers and processes plays an important role in the current distributions of these transitions as well as in their species composition and ecosystem functioning. This ecotone can be sensitive to shifts in climate and other driving factors, but is also potentially stabilized by negative feedback processes. There is abundant evidence that these transitions are shifting under contemporary global and local changes, but the direction of shift varies according to region. However, it still remains uncertain how these transitions will respond to rapid and multi-faceted ongoing current changes, and how increasing human influence will interact with these shifts.This article is part of the themed issue 'Tropical grassy biomes: linking ecology, human use and conservation'.
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