2023-12-28 05:08:22
The forests of Southeast Asia they resisted the savannization during the last glacial maximumaccording to a new study that suggests they can now help resist the impacts of climate change.
A team of international scientists led by Dr Rebecca Hamilton from the University of Sydney has discovered that instead of a dry savanna in Southeast Asia that dominated during the Last Glacial Maximum more than 19,000 years agothere was a mosaic of diverse types of closed and open forests, turning previous scientific consensus on its head.
The findings suggest that Asia’s tropical forests could be more resilient to climate change than previously thought, as long as landscape diversity is maintained. They further show that humans and animals migrating through the region would have had a more diverse resource base than previously thought.
The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1).
Hamilton, of the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, said it’s a statement With climate change accelerating, scientists and environmentalists have been concerned about the impact this will have on rainforests in regions such as Southeast Asia.
Important to prevent future ‘savannization’
“Maintaining forest types that facilitate resilience should be a conservation goal for the region. Our work suggests that prioritizing the protection of forests above 1,000 meters (‘montane forests’) along with seasonally dry forest types could be important to prevent future ‘savannisation’ of Asia’s tropical forests“, said.
Savannization refers to the metamorphosis of a landscape, typically a forested area, into a savanna ecosystem, typically involving open forested plains. Change is usually induced by climatic variations, human interventions or natural ecological dynamics.
The researchers analyzed records from 59 paleoenvironmental sites in tropical Southeast Asia to test the so-called savanna model, which assumed that a large, uniform grassland expanded across the region during the Last Glacial Maximum.
They found that records of pollen grains preserved in lakes show that forests persisted during this period along with an expansion of grasslands, indicated by other biochemical signatures.
“We present the idea that these apparent discrepancies can be reconciled if, during the cold, seasonal climate of the Last Glacial Maximum, mountain forests (above 1000 m) persisted and expanded in high elevation regions, while lowlands experienced a change to seasonally dry forests, that have a naturally grassy understory“Hamilton said.
References (1) Forest mosaics, not savanna corridors, dominated in Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Maximum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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