ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Floristic evidence for alternative biome states in tropical Africa.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed, 91 citations in OpenAlex.
- The origin and development of the Miocene northwest African savanna.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Identification of two genomic cryptotypes of Plasmodium malariae in Africa.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2026Article
- Climatic preferences of major plant clades define the functional attributes of African savanna types.npj biodiversity · 2026Article
- Topography is a Major Determinant of Forest-Savanna Distributions in Mosaic Landscapes in Central Africa.Ecosystems (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- The role of fire on Earth.Bioscience · 2025Review
- A Busse Balloon in the Lagoon: Herbivore Behaviour Generates Spatial Patterns in Coral Reef Ecosystems.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Biome evolution in subfamily Cercidoideae (Leguminosae): a tropical arborescent clade with a relictual depauperate temperate lineage.Revista brasileira de botanica : Brazilian journal of botany · 2025Article
- Interactions between soil and other environmental variables modulate forest expansion and ecotone dynamics in humid savannas of Central Africa.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- 40 years of forest dynamics and tree demography in an intact tropical forest at M'Baïki in central Africa.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Positive feedbacks and alternative stable states in forest leaf types.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Fire-modulated fluctuations in nutrient availability stimulate biome-scale floristic turnover in time, and elevated species richness, in low-nutrient fynbos heathland.Annals of botany · 2024Article
- Article
- Emergent structure and dynamics of tropical forest-grassland landscapes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Dissecting the difference in tree species richness between Africa and South America.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Kelp-forest dynamics controlled by substrate complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
33 authors at 20 institutions in 15 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The idea that tropical forest and savanna are alternative states is crucial to how we manage these biomes and predict their future under global change. Large-scale empirical evidence for alternative stable states is limited, however, and comes mostly from the multimodal distribution of structural aspects of vegetation. These approaches have been criticized, as structure alone cannot separate out wetter savannas from drier forests for example, and there are also technical challenges to mapping vegetation structure in unbiased ways. Here, we develop an alternative approach to delimit the climatic envelope of the two biomes in Africa using tree species lists gathered for a large number of forest and savanna sites distributed across the continent. Our analyses confirm extensive climatic overlap of forest and savanna, supporting the alternative stable states hypothesis for Africa, and this result is corroborated by paleoecological evidence. Further, we find the two biomes to have highly divergent tree species compositions and to represent alternative compositional states. This allowed us to classify tree species as forest vs. savanna specialists, with some generalist species that span both biomes. In conjunction with georeferenced herbarium records, we mapped the forest and savanna distributions across Africa and quantified their environmental limits, which are primarily related to precipitation and seasonality, with a secondary contribution of fire. These results are important for the ongoing efforts to restore African ecosystems, which depend on accurate biome maps to set appropriate targets for the restored states but also provide empirical evidence for broad-scale bistability.
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