Abstract
Residents of Southern Africa depend on rangeland for food, livelihoods, and ecosystem services. Sustainable management of rangeland ecosystems requires attention to interactive effects of fire and grazing in a changing climate. It is essential to compare rangeland responses to fire and grazing across space and through time to understand the effects of rangeland management practices on biodiversity and ecosystem services in an era of global climate change. We propose a paradigm of ecologically-analogous rangeland management within the context of multifunctional landscapes to guide design and application of ecosystem-based rangeland research in Southern Africa. We synthesize range science from the North American Great Plains and Southern African savannas into a proposal for fire and grazing research on rangeland in Southern Africa. We discuss how management for the fire-grazing interaction might advance multiple goals including agricultural productivity, biodiversity conservation, and resilience to increased variability under global change. Finally, we discuss several ecological and social issues important to the effective development of sustainable rangeland practices especially within the context of global climate change. The associated literature review serves as a comprehensive bibliography for sustainable rangeland management and development across the savanna biomes of Southern Africa.
Highlights
Rangelands worldwide constitute the largest human-impacted biome [1]
Within the broad movement to manage Southern African rangeland sustainably—savannas and grassland alike—is an opportunity to focus on the multifunctional nature of these ecosystems
Millions of Southern Africans depend on rangeland for economic and cultural products, in addition to ecosystem services
Summary
Rangelands worldwide constitute the largest human-impacted biome [1]. In Southern Africa, gaps in the conservation reserve network [2] leave the region’s rangeland under-represented in formally protected areas [3,4]. The ecological interaction of fire and grazing—known broadly as pyric-herbivory [18] but referred to as patch burn-grazing in the context of management [19]—has been shown to increase rangeland biodiversity in the North American Great Plains [20,21,22]. While previous research has established clear links between rangeland ecosystems in Southern Africa and the Great Plains [23,24,25,26] and evidence of the fire-grazing interaction has been documented in Africa [27,28], no studies have yet explicitly tested patch burn-grazing in Southern Africa despite calls for such work in the region [29]. We describe potential limitations, specific advantages, and other considerations of fire and grazing management ahead of initiating field studies along several ecological and socio-economic gradients that span savanna and grassland ecosystems of Southern Africa
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