The African savannah is a unique ecosystem with many endemic species. A savannah by itself is a grassland with trees in it, but not enough trees that the canopy closes, so there is plenty of light that reaches the ground. Most people believe savannahs to have scattered trees, but the tree density is actually surprisingly high, almost at the level of regular forests.
Tarangire National Park in Tanzania, a good example of the African savannah ecosystem. If you zoom in you will also realize that there is a nice amount of wildlife in the photo! Image is Public Domain.
As you probably know, the savannah is home to lots of well-known and iconic animal species such as lions, hyenas, leopards, warthogs, impalas, gazelles and a lot of other cool species, and a new research paper has a suggested method for increasing the species richness even more; by lighting the savannah on fire.
The king of the savannah! Image by Bernard DUPONT, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Creating wildfire to promote species richness
A brand new research paper from the University of York has looked at how wildfire in the African savannah has affected the species richness in the area, and their conclusion is pretty clear; areas with wildfire have a higher species richness!
The study looked at savannah areas all over Africa, and focused mainly on mammal and bird species richness. Rainy savannah with pyrodiversity boosts had an increase of 27 % mammals and 40 % birds compared to areas that are the same, but without any pyrodiversity.
People commonly think of fires as a static phenomenon, but it is in reality a wide range of different characteristics, such as duration, intensity, size, season and frequency, and the pyrodiversity is a number to explain how much diversity is found within the fires of a given area.
The influence of pyrodiversity correlated with rainfall, and had the best effect in wet savannahs that have more than 650mm rainfall per year. While all savannahs benefits from having fires every once in a while, the wet savannahs were the habitats that got a huge increase in species richness.
Another cool finding of the study was that the rare bids rufous-tailed weaver (Histurgops ruficauda) and black-bellied sunbird (Cinnyris nectarinioides) were more commonly found alongside common birds in areas with a higher pyrodiversity. This is likely because they need a regular fire for their niche, and might be outcompeted by other species if the area develops for too long without any fires.
A rufous-tailed weaver (Histurgops ruficauda), one of the birds who had a positive effect of fires. Image by Profberger at English Wikipedia, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Does it really make sense to induce fires in the savannah?
We all think of forest fires as something terrible, and for the most part this is correct. However, humans and other hominids have set fire to the savannah for a very long time, and according to lead author of the study, Dr Colin Beale from the Department of Biology at the University of York, we have been setting fire to the savannahs for over a million years. This means that the savannah ecosystem has adapted and coevolved in response to this, which is why it might actually be a bad thing that we have stopped doing it.
The research seem to back up this claim, and as a matter of fact, setting the savannah on fire might be a viable conservation strategy that could be used by conservation biologists in the future. Of course we still need a bit more research before we start setting things on fire, but the first results are looking promising.
A forest fire. Note: not Africa, and not a savannah. Image by Bunk S: World on Fire. PLoS Biol 2/2/2004: e54. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0020054.g001, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
So, why does fire diversity increase species richness?
The reason why the scientists believe that the wildfires increase the species richness is because fires allow for the savannah to create a wider range of conditions for the habitat. The fires will alter the availability of nutrients, change the terrain, change the composition of predator and prey ratio, and change the available food for grazers since plant composition will also change.
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