New and Repeating Tipping Points: The Interplay of Fire, Climate Change, and Deforestation in Neotropical Ecosystems

Bush, Mark B.

doi:10.3417/2020565

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 110 publications

(119 reference statements)

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“…In caveless tropical rainforests, degradation of native vegetation cover usually decreases the species richness of several groups of plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates 28 . However, degradation in the studied landscapes also increased the order richness of several vertebrates and invertebrates inside caves, suggesting its role as refuge for wildlife, somewhat analogous to microrefugia which have protected biodiversity for thousands of years from fire and other anthropogenic disturbances 29 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Caves as wildlife refuges in degraded landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon

Fraga

Tavares

Simões

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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Cross-habitat spillover may be the outcome of a process of habitat loss or degradation where the receiving habitat serves as a refuge for organisms. Once surface habitats are lost or degraded, animals can find underground refuge in caves. This paper is focused on testing whether taxonomic order richness inside caves is positively affected by the loss of the native vegetation cover surrounding caves; whether degradation of native vegetation cover predicts cave community composition; and whether there is a pattern of cave community clusters delimited by similarity in the effects of habitat degradation on animal communities. We gathered a comprehensive speleological dataset consisting of occurrence data of thousands of invertebrates and vertebrates sampled in 864 iron caves in the Amazon, to test the effects of both variables measured inside caves and surrounding landscapes on spatial variation in richness and composition of animal communities. We show that caves can work as refuges for the fauna in landscapes where the native vegetation cover surrounding them was degraded, which was evidenced by landcover change increasing the richness of cave communities and clustering caves by similarity in community composition. Therefore, habitat degradation on the surface should be a key variable when characterizing cave ecosystems for conservation prioritization and offset planning. Habitat degradation causing a cross-habitat spillover effect highlights the importance of maintaining the connection between caves by the surface, especially large caves. Our study can help guide industry and stakeholders working on the complex conciliation between land use and biodiversity conservation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Caves as wildlife refuges in degraded landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon

Fraga

Tavares

Simões

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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“…Records from Figure 2. Infographic depicting the relationship of processes and factors that determine the socioecological production landscape as a complex, adaptive, and coupled system between nature and culture, highlighting the important contribution of resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to understand the jungle as redundant ecological legacies acted from ancestral interactions [37].…”

Section: Ecological Legacies Of the Amazon And Ecotourismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological Legacies and Ethnotourism: Bridging Science and Community in Ecuador’s Amazonia

Sarmiento,

Bush,

McMichael

et al. 2024

Sustainability

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This paper offers paradigmatic insights from an international workshop on Ecological Legacies: Bridge Between Science and Community, in Ecuador, in the summer of 2023. The conference brought together foreign and local scholars, tour operators, village community, and Indigenous leaders in the upper Amazonia region of Ecuador with the goal of developing a vision for a sustainable and regenerative future of the upper Amazon. The conference offered three epistemological contributions to the existing literature in the emergent field of Montology, including addressing issues of (a) understanding the existing linguistic hegemony in describing tropical environments, (b) the redress of mistaken notions on pristine jungle environments, and (c) the inclusion of traditional knowledge and transdisciplinary approaches to understand the junglescape from different perspectives and scientific traditions. Methodologically, the conference bridged the fields of palaeoecological and ethnobotanical knowledge (as part of a wider conversation between science and local communities). Results show that local knowledge should be incorporated into the study of the junglescape and its conservation, with decolonial approaches for tourism, sharing language, methodology, tradition, and dissemination of the forest’s attributes. Our research helped co-create and formulate the “Coca Declaration” calling for a philosophical turn in research, bridging science and ethnotourism in ways that are local, emancipatory, and transdisciplinary. We conclude that facilitating new vocabulary by decolonial heightening of Indigenous perspectives of the junglescape helps to incorporate the notion of different Amazons, including the mountainscape of the Andean–Amazonian flanks. We also conclude that we can no consider Ecuador the country of “pure nature” since we helped demystify pristine nature for foreign tourists and highlighted local views with ancestral practices. Finally, we conclude that ethnotourism is a viable alternative to manage heritagization of the junglescape as a hybrid territory with the ecological legacies of the past and present inhabitants of upper Amazonia.

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“…It is also likely that the general forest limit was not regionally defined within a narrow elevational range but may have varied by hundreds of metres in elevation according to local conditions. Thus, when warming started between 21 and 19 kcal BP, the upslope migration of species would have been from a wide range of species and genotype-specific starting points [44]. Similar to today, there was probably considerable variation in the capacity of trees to migrate, with some keeping pace with, and others lagging behind, the rate of climate change [45].…”

Section: Tree Migration and Reshaping Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A palaeoecological perspective on the transformation of the tropical Andes by early human activity

Bush

Rozas‐Davila

Raczka

et al. 2022

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Palaeoecological records suggest that humans have been in the Andes since at least 14 000 years ago. Early human impacts on Andean ecosystems included an increase in fire activity and the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. These changes in Andean ecosystems coincided with rapid climate change as species were migrating upslope in response to deglacial warming. Microrefugia probably played a vital role in the speed and genetic composition of that migration. The period from ca 14 500 to 12 500 years ago was when novel combinations of plant species appeared to form no-analogue assemblages in the Andes. By 12 000 years ago most areas in what are today the Andean grasslands were being burned and modified by human activity. As the vegetation of these highland settings has been modified by human activity for the entirety of the Holocene, they should be regarded as long-term manufactutred landscapes. The sharp tree lines separating Andean forests from grasslands that we see today were probably also created by repeated burning and owe their position more to human-induced fire than climatic constraints. In areas that were readly penetrated by humans on the forested slopes of the Andes, substantial modification and settlement had occurred by the mid-Holocene. In hard-to-reach areas, however, the amount of human modification may always have been minimal, and these slopes can be considered as being close to natural in their vegetation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.

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New and Repeating Tipping Points: The Interplay of Fire, Climate Change, and Deforestation in Neotropical Ecosystems

Cited by 7 publications

References 110 publications

Caves as wildlife refuges in degraded landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon

Caves as wildlife refuges in degraded landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon

Ecological Legacies and Ethnotourism: Bridging Science and Community in Ecuador’s Amazonia

A palaeoecological perspective on the transformation of the tropical Andes by early human activity

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