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Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change
Tree cover is a key variable for ecosystem functioning, and is widely used to study tropical ecosystems. But its determinants and their relative importance are still a matter of debate, especially because most regional and global analyses have not considered the influence of agricultural practices....
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278362/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28134259 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep41393 |
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author | Aleman, Julie C. Blarquez, Olivier Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie Bremond, Laurent Favier, Charly |
author_facet | Aleman, Julie C. Blarquez, Olivier Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie Bremond, Laurent Favier, Charly |
author_sort | Aleman, Julie C. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Tree cover is a key variable for ecosystem functioning, and is widely used to study tropical ecosystems. But its determinants and their relative importance are still a matter of debate, especially because most regional and global analyses have not considered the influence of agricultural practices. More information is urgently needed regarding how human practices influence vegetation structure. Here we focused in Central Africa, a region still subjected to traditional agricultural practices with a clear vegetation gradient. Using remote sensing data and global databases, we calibrated a Random Forest model to correlatively link tree cover with climatic, edaphic, fire and agricultural practices data. We showed that annual rainfall and accumulated water deficit were the main drivers of the distribution of tree cover and vegetation classes (defined by the modes of tree cover density), but agricultural practices, especially pastoralism, were also important in determining tree cover. We simulated future tree cover with our model using different scenarios of climate and land-use (agriculture and population) changes. Our simulations suggest that tree cover may respond differently regarding the type of scenarios, but land-use change was an important driver of vegetation change even able to counterbalance the effect of climate change in Central Africa. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5278362 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-52783622017-02-03 Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change Aleman, Julie C. Blarquez, Olivier Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie Bremond, Laurent Favier, Charly Sci Rep Article Tree cover is a key variable for ecosystem functioning, and is widely used to study tropical ecosystems. But its determinants and their relative importance are still a matter of debate, especially because most regional and global analyses have not considered the influence of agricultural practices. More information is urgently needed regarding how human practices influence vegetation structure. Here we focused in Central Africa, a region still subjected to traditional agricultural practices with a clear vegetation gradient. Using remote sensing data and global databases, we calibrated a Random Forest model to correlatively link tree cover with climatic, edaphic, fire and agricultural practices data. We showed that annual rainfall and accumulated water deficit were the main drivers of the distribution of tree cover and vegetation classes (defined by the modes of tree cover density), but agricultural practices, especially pastoralism, were also important in determining tree cover. We simulated future tree cover with our model using different scenarios of climate and land-use (agriculture and population) changes. Our simulations suggest that tree cover may respond differently regarding the type of scenarios, but land-use change was an important driver of vegetation change even able to counterbalance the effect of climate change in Central Africa. Nature Publishing Group 2017-01-30 /pmc/articles/PMC5278362/ /pubmed/28134259 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep41393 Text en Copyright © 2017, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Aleman, Julie C. Blarquez, Olivier Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie Bremond, Laurent Favier, Charly Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
title | Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
title_full | Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
title_fullStr | Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
title_full_unstemmed | Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
title_short | Tree cover in Central Africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
title_sort | tree cover in central africa: determinants and sensitivity under contrasted scenarios of global change |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5278362/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28134259 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep41393 |
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