The Vegetation of the Ghanzi Area of Western Botswana

Pastoralists’ Perception and Ecological Knowledge on Savanna Ecosystem Dynamics in Semi-arid Botswana

“…The heterogeneity of the grass composition across the landscape was probably influenced by variability in soil characteristics, grazing pressure (Cole andBrown 1976, Roba andOba 2009), and rainfall (Thomas and Twyman 2004), as observed during the ecological assessment (Kgosikoma 2011). The dominance of A. congesta, which is an increaser II species Ecology and Society 17(4): 27 http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss4/art27/ (Trollope et al 1989), probably indicates that overgrazing is occurring in both the ranches and communal grazing land due to keeping a high number of livestock that exceeds the rangeland's carrying capacity.…”

Tree spacing along the Kalahari transect in southern Africa

“…In order to take these considerations into account, site locations were chosen to be in areas without access to shallow water tables or near-surface bedrock, making ground-water availability of secondary importance to rainfall when considering vegetation structure. An important exception to the geologic uniformity of the region is the area around the Okavango Delta, where the occurrence of near-surface impermeable zones associated with duplex soils causes dramatically different drainage properties (Cole & Brown, 1976). This area is notable for the dominance of Colophospermum mopane, which forms nearly monospecific stands where these impermeable layers are extensive (Timberlake, 1995).…”

Life-form spectra of Brazilian cerrado sites

“…This system has been widely applied in many vegetation types to classify plant species in life-forms, as, for example, deserts (Qadir & Shevty 1986;El-Demerdash et al 1994;El-Ghani 1998), meadows (Beaman & Andresen 1966), Mediterranean vegetation (Dimopoulus & Georgiadis 1992; Christodoulakis 1996), prairies (Stalter et al 1991), savannas (Cole & Brown 1976;Sarmiento & Monasterio 1983), temperate forests (Buell & Wilbur 1948;Gao & Chen 1998), tundra (Raunkiaer 1934), tropical grasslands (Shankar et al 1991), and tropical rain forests (Cain et al 1956). …”