The importance of C3 and C4 grasses and CAM shrubs in the Greater Cape Floristic Region under contemporary and Last Glacial Maximum climates

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Southern Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) – a hotspot of biological diversity and palaeo-anthropological evidence for modern human evolution – is a climatically complex region where broad climatic gradients influence the relative importance of plant photosynthetic types in local vegetation. This mix of photosynthetic pathways imprint an isotopic signature on palaeo-records, thereby allowing for the reconstruction of historical climate and vegetation. Here, we use vegetation plot data, coupled with the photosynthetic-type affinities of plant genera, to relate their relative cover to bioclimatic drivers and use these to create spatial distribution models of C3 and C4 grasses and CAM shrubs across the contemporary GCFR. We then use palaeodistribution modelling, drawing on downscaled climate models for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), to hindcast the LGM distributions of photosynthetic types for the GCFR and its then-exposed offshore areas. In addition, we construct a model to account for the effect of lower atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) during the LGM on the competitive interactions between C3 and C4 grasses and use this model to hindcast relative C4-grass cover across the glacial-era GCFR. Our palaeodistribution models suggest that, even though there were some reductions in CAM cover and shifts in C3-/C4-dominated grass layers between the LGM and Holocene, these were mostly localised, with changes at the regional scale being relatively muted. For C3/C4 grasses, distributional shifts were even more subtle once sub-ambient glacial [CO2] was accounted for. Our hindcasts of glacial, [CO2]-adjusted grass cover show agreements and inconsistencies with various sedimentary and herbivore-diet records in the palaeo-archive: both lines of evidence suggest the dominance of C3 species in the strongly winter-rainfall western GCFR; in the eastern GCFR, with muted rainfall seasonality, hindcasts of relative C3:C4 cover and δ13C signals from palaeo-records vary, with greater disparities between them. The lack of significant upheavals in the distribution of photosynthetic types suggests that the GCFR presented a relatively stable and dependable resourcescape for hunter-gatherer populations through the glacial–interglacial cycle of the LGM–Holocene transition. Our maps of relative C3-/C4-grass and CAM-shrub cover provide a reasonable surrogate for relative biomass of different photosynthetic types in local vegetation at a landscape scale and depict an independent estimate of carbon isoscapes across the GCFR – under both an interglacial (Holocene) and glacial (terminal Pleistocene) climate – against which palaeo-records can be assessed.