Madagascar's grasses and grasslands: anthropogenic or natural?

Proceedings. Biological Sciences
Maria S VorontsovaH Peter Linder

Abstract

Grasses, by their high productivity even under very low pCO2, their ability to survive repeated burning and to tolerate long dry seasons, have transformed the terrestrial biomes in the Neogene and Quaternary. The expansion of grasslands at the cost of biodiverse forest biomes in Madagascar is often postulated as a consequence of the Holocene settlement of the island by humans. However, we show that the Malagasy grass flora has many indications of being ancient with a long local evolutionary history, much predating the Holocene arrival of humans. First, the level of endemism in the Madagascar grass flora is well above the global average for large islands. Second, a survey of many of the more diverse areas indicates that there is a very high spatial and ecological turnover in the grass flora, indicating a high degree of niche specialization. We also find some evidence that there are both recently disturbed and natural stable grasslands: phylogenetic community assembly indicates that recently severely disturbed grasslands are phylogenetically clustered, whereas more undisturbed grasslands tend to be phylogenetically more evenly distributed. From this evidence, it is likely that grass communities existed in Madagascar long before h...Continue Reading

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Citations

May 25, 2016·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·William Bond, Nicholas P Zaloumis
Jul 8, 2016·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·L R Godfrey, B E Crowley
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Oct 29, 2020·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Grant S Joseph, Colleen L Seymour
Oct 2, 2021·The Science of the Total Environment·Liesa BrosensGerard Govers

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Software Mentioned

MNTD
R package ape
picante
stats
Mesquite system
Stata
RAxML
MPD
ARCGIS

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