Title

Grass-dominated vegetation, not species-diverse natural savanna, replaces degraded tropical forests on the southern edge of the Amazon Basin

Document Type

Article

Publication details

Veldman, JW & Putz, FE 2011, 'Grass-dominated vegetation, not species-diverse natural savanna, replaces degraded tropical forests on the southern edge of the Amazon Basin', Biological Conservation, vol. 144, no. 5, pp. 1419-1429.

The publisher's version is available at

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2011.01.011

Peer Reviewed

Peer-Reviewed

Abstract

Changes in land-uses, fire regimes, and climate are expected to promote savanna expansion in the Amazon Basin, but most studies that come to this conclusion fail to define "savanna" clearly or imply that natural savannas of native species will spread at the expense of forest. Given their different conservation values, we sought to differentiate between species-diverse natural savannas and other types of fire-maintained grass-dominated vegetation that replaced tropical forests between 1986 and 2005 in 22,500 km