Recurrent extreme weather patterns under global warming impose an urgent need to recognise and conserve species likely to be impacted. In temperate areas, evidence is growing for species shifting ranges along temperature gradients. Comparable conjecture is gaining traction around changes in herbivores distributions in African savanna. Nonetheless, this needs careful investigations particularly because savanna antelopes establish range consequent of forage availability driven by rainfall. Rainfall events are widely disparate thus, range shifting along clear-cut gradients maybe uncertain. We investigated tsessebe, roan and sable antelope distributions in the 200 00km 2-Kruger National Park because these species exhibit a few traits typically used to predict climate change vulnerability. We predicted that extirpations would occur from regions that become marginal in terms of forage production, but persisting where conditions remain more suitable. We evaluated associations between range occupations for these species relative to rainfall, temperature, and forage availability for a period extending over two decades examining if distribution changes followed particular gradients. Results showed extirpations from areas that had become less suitable, but persistence where conditions remained favourable with respect to forage availability. Number of herds rather than herd-sizes generated the range changes. During high rainfall years, the 1970s, numerous herds had established and ranges expanded, stabilizing early 1980s, and thereafter ranges progressively contracted following prolonged moisture deficit periods, after 1987. Remnant and small herds persisted on discrete on patches that retained adequate forage in formerly contiguous ranges. Thus, in heterogeneous savanna, assumptions on range shifting along climatic gradients may not hold.
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