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Palaeoecology

Did forests survive the cold in a hotspot?

Nature volume 391, pages 125–127 (1998)Cite this article

Assembling all of the available information, in 1982, Hamilton2 suggested that certain core areas, probably resulting from refuges that had survived the climatic shocks of the Pleistocene (roughly the past two million years), acted as centres for forest spread and recolonization of central Africa during the Holocene. Among these cores were eastern Zaire (including the western fringes of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, bordering the Western Rift Valley), the coastal area of eastern Tanzania, and the west coast of Africa in Cameroon/Gabon. Possible minor core areas were also proposed, in northern Mozambique and in Ethiopia. According to Hamilton, the plant and animal species spread from these postulated refugia as they moved into the intervening areas and reassembled the interglacial forest.

To put this hypothesis to the test, palaeoecological information is needed to document patterns of vegetation change in these regions. Moreover, a number of sites must be investigated, to detect differential movements and to avoid the problems that arise from the possible use of an atypical site. In the latest study by Jolly et al.1, five suitable sites were located along the highlands on the eastern side of the Western Rift Valley, running in a north-south transect of about 300 km. All sites were peat-accumulating swamps within the broad-leaved forest zone. Their depths ranged from 7 to 23 metres, and all contained well-preserved pollen. Some of the cores contained material dating from as far back as 18,000 years before present (BP), thus taking the vegetation history record back to the coldest stage of the last glacial episode.

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Figure 1: Map of east Africa, showing the swamp locations studied by Jolly et al.1.
Figure 2

References

  1. Jolly, D.et al. J. Biogeogr. 24, 495–512 (1997).

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  2. Hamilton, A. Environmental History of East Africa (Academic, London, 1982).

  3. Becker, B., Kromer, B. & Trimborn, P. Nature 353, 647–649 (1991).

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  4. Jacobson, G. L., Webb, T. & Grimm, E. C. in The Geology of North America Vol. K-3 (eds Ruddiman, W. F. & Wright, H. E.) 277-288 (Geol. Soc. Am., New York, 1987).

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  1. the Division of Life Sciences, Kings College, Campden Hill Road, London, W8 7AH, UK

    Peter D. Moore

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  1. Peter D. Moore
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Moore, P. Did forests survive the cold in a hotspot?. Nature 391, 125–127 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/34292

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