Cutmarked bone of drought-tolerant extinct megafauna deposited with traces of fire, human foraging, and introduced animals in SW Madagascar.

People could have hunted Madagascar's megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa and drought exacerbated the effects of predation. However, such explanations are difficult to test due to the scarcity of individual sites with unambiguous traces of humans, introduced taxa, and endemic megaherbivores. We excavated three coastal ponds in arid SW Madagascar and present a unique combination of traces of human activity (modified pygmy hippo bone, processed estuarine shell and fish bone, and charcoal), along with bones of extinct megafauna (giant tortoises, pygmy hippos, and elephant birds), extirpated fauna (e.g., crocodiles), and introduced vertebrates (e.g., zebu cattle). The disappearance of megafauna from the study sites at ~ 1000 years ago followed a relatively arid interval and closely coincides with increasingly frequent traces of human foraging, fire, and pastoralism. Our analyses fail to document drought-associated extirpation or multiple millennia of megafauna hunting and suggest that a late combination of hunting, forest clearance, and pastoralism drove extirpations.

Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa.

Modern Homo sapiens engage in substantial ecosystem modification, but it is difficult to detect the origins or early consequences of these behaviors. Archaeological, geochronological, geomorphological, and paleoenvironmental data from northern Malawi document a changing relationship between forager presence, ecosystem organization, and alluvial fan formation in the Late Pleistocene. Dense concentrations of Middle Stone Age artifacts and alluvial fan systems formed after ca. 92 thousand years ago, within a paleoecological context with no analog in the preceding half-million-year record. Archaeological data and principal coordinates analysis indicate that early anthropogenic fire relaxed seasonal constraints on ignitions, influencing vegetation composition and erosion. This operated in tandem with climate-driven changes in precipitation to culminate in an ecological transition to an early, pre-agricultural anthropogenic landscape.

Global acceleration in rates of vegetation change over the past 18,000 years.

Global vegetation over the past 18,000 years has been transformed first by the climate changes that accompanied the last deglaciation and again by increasing human pressures; however, the magnitude and patterns of rates of vegetation change are poorly understood globally. Using a compilation of 1181 fossil pollen sequences and newly developed statistical methods, we detect a worldwide acceleration in the rates of vegetation compositional change beginning between 4.6 and 2.9 thousand years ago that is globally unprecedented over the past 18,000 years in both magnitude and extent. Late Holocene rates of change equal or exceed the deglacial rates for all continents, which suggests that the scale of human effects on terrestrial ecosystems exceeds even the climate-driven transformations of the last deglaciation. The acceleration of biodiversity change demonstrated in ecological datasets from the past century began millennia ago.

The emergence and intensification of early hunter-gatherer niche construction.

Hunter-gatherers, especially Pleistocene examples, are not well-represented in archeological studies of niche construction. However, as the role of humans in shaping environments over long time scales becomes increasingly apparent, it is critical to develop archeological proxies and testable hypotheses about early hunter-gatherer impacts. Modern foragers engage in niche constructive behaviors aimed at maintaining or increasing the productivity of their environments, and these may have had significant ecological consequences over later human evolution. In some cases, they may also represent behaviors unique to modern Homo sapiens. Archeological and paleoenvironmental data show that African hunter-gatherers were niche constructors in diverse environments, which have legacies in how ecosystems function today. These can be conceptualized as behaviorally mediated trophic cascades, and tested using archeological and paleoenvironmental proxies. Thus, large-scale niche construction behavior is possible to identify at deeper time scales, and may be key to understanding the emergence of modern humans.

Zooplankton monitoring to contribute towards addressing global biodiversity conservation challenges.

Oceanographers have an increasing responsibility to ensure that the outcomes of scientific research are conveyed to the policy-making sphere to achieve conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity. Zooplankton monitoring projects have helped to increase our understanding of the processes by which marine ecosystems respond to climate change and other environmental variations, ranging from regional to global scales, and its scientific value is recognized in the contexts of fisheries, biodiversity and global change studies. Nevertheless, zooplankton data have rarely been used at policy level for conservation and management of marine ecosystems services. One way that this can be pragmatically and effectively achieved is via the development of zooplankton indicators, which could for instance contribute to filling in gaps in the suite of global indicators to track progress against the Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the United Nations Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2010-2020. This article begins by highlighting how under-represented the marine realm is within the current suite of global Aichi Target indicators. We then examine the potential to develop global indicators for relevant Aichi Targets, using existing zooplankton monitoring data, to address global biodiversity conservation challenges.

Past and future global transformation of terrestrial ecosystems under climate change.

Impacts of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems are imperfectly constrained by ecosystem models and direct observations. Pervasive ecosystem transformations occurred in response to warming and associated climatic changes during the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, which was comparable in magnitude to warming projected for the next century under high-emission scenarios. We reviewed 594 published paleoecological records to examine compositional and structural changes in terrestrial vegetation since the last glacial period and to project the magnitudes of ecosystem transformations under alternative future emission scenarios. Our results indicate that terrestrial ecosystems are highly sensitive to temperature change and suggest that, without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are at risk of major transformation, with accompanying disruption of ecosystem services and impacts on biodiversity.

Waxing and waning of forests: Late Quaternary biogeography of southeast Africa.

African ecosystems are at great risk. Despite their ecological and economic importance, long-standing ideas about African forest ecology and biogeography, such as the timing of changes in forest extent and the importance of disturbance, have been unable to be tested due to a lack of sufficiently long records. Here, we present the longest continuous terrestrial record of late Quaternary vegetation from southern Africa collected to date from a drill core from Lake Malawi covering the last ~600,000 years. Pollen analysis permits us to investigate changes in vegetation structure and composition over multiple climatic transitions. We observe nine phases of forest expansion and collapse related to regional hydroclimate change. The development of desert, steppe and grassland vegetation during arid periods is likely dynamically linked to thresholds in regional hydrology associated with lake level and moisture recycling. Species composition of these dryland ecosystems varied greatly and is unlike the vegetation found at Malawi today, with assemblages suggesting strong Somali-Masai affinities. Furthermore, nearly all semiarid assemblages contain low forest taxa abundances, suggesting that moist lowland gallery forests formed refugia along waterways during arid times. When the region was wet, forests were species-rich and very high afromontane tree abundances suggest frequent widespread lowland colonization by modern high elevation trees. Furthermore, species composition varied little amongst forest phases until ~80 ka when disturbance tolerant tree taxa characteristic of the modern vegetation increased in abundance. The waxing and waning of forests has important implications for understanding the processes that control modern tropical vegetation biogeography as well as the environments of early humans across Africa. Finally, this work highlights the resilience of montane forests during previous warm intervals, which is relevant for future climate change; however, we point to a fundamental shift in disturbance regimes which are crucial for the structure and composition of modern East African landscapes.

The major barriers to evidence-informed conservation policy and possible solutions.

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision-making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence-informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global survey aimed at identifying top barriers and solutions to the use of conservation science in policy. This obtained the views of 758 people in policy, practice, and research positions from 68 countries across six languages. Here we show that, contrary to popular belief, there is agreement between groups about how to incorporate conservation science into policy, and there is thus room for optimism. Barriers related to the low priority of conservation were considered to be important, while mainstreaming conservation was proposed as a key solution. Therefore, priorities should focus on convincing the public of the importance of conservation as an issue, which will then influence policy-makers to adopt pro-environmental long-term policies.

Environmental change explains cichlid adaptive radiation at Lake Malawi over the past 1.2 million years.

Long paleoecological records are critical for understanding evolutionary responses to environmental forcing and unparalleled tools for elucidating the mechanisms that lead to the development of regions of high biodiversity. We use a 1.2-My record from Lake Malawi, a textbook example of biological diversification, to document how climate and tectonics have driven ecosystem and evolutionary dynamics. Before ∼800 ka, Lake Malawi was much shallower than today, with higher frequency but much lower amplitude water-level and oxygenation changes. Since ∼800 ka, the lake has experienced much larger environmental fluctuations, best explained by a punctuated, tectonically driven rise in its outlet location and level. Following the reorganization of the basin, a change in the pacing of hydroclimate variability associated with the Mid-Pleistocene Transition resulted in hydrologic change dominated by precession rather than the high-latitude teleconnections recorded elsewhere. During this time, extended, deep lake phases have abruptly alternated with times of extreme aridity and ecosystem variability. Repeated crossings of hydroclimatic thresholds within the lake system were critical for establishing the rhythm of diversification, hybridization, and extinction that dominate the modern system. The chronology of these changes closely matches both the timing and pattern of phylogenetic history inferred independently for the lake's extraordinary array of cichlid fish species, suggesting a direct link between environmental and evolutionary dynamics.

Continuous 1.3-million-year record of East African hydroclimate, and implications for patterns of evolution and biodiversity.

The transport of moisture in the tropics is a critical process for the global energy budget and on geologic timescales, has markedly influenced continental landscapes, migratory pathways, and biological evolution. Here we present a continuous, first-of-its-kind 1.3-My record of continental hydroclimate and lake-level variability derived from drill core data from Lake Malawi, East Africa (9-15° S). Over the Quaternary, we observe dramatic shifts in effective moisture, resulting in large-scale changes in one of the world's largest lakes and most diverse freshwater ecosystems. Results show evidence for 24 lake level drops of more than 200 m during the Late Quaternary, including 15 lowstands when water levels were more than 400 m lower than modern. A dramatic shift is observed at the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), consistent with far-field climate forcing, which separates vastly different hydroclimate regimes before and after ∼800,000 years ago. Before 800 ka, lake levels were lower, indicating a climate drier than today, and water levels changed frequently. Following the MPT high-amplitude lake level variations dominate the record. From 800 to 100 ka, a deep, often overfilled lake occupied the basin, indicating a wetter climate, but these highstands were interrupted by prolonged intervals of extreme drought. Periods of high lake level are observed during times of high eccentricity. The extreme hydroclimate variability exerted a profound influence on the Lake Malawi endemic cichlid fish species flock; the geographically extensive habitat reconfiguration provided novel ecological opportunities, enabling new populations to differentiate rapidly to distinct species.

Vegetation controls on weathering intensity during the last deglacial transition in southeast Africa.

Tropical climate is rapidly changing, but the effects of these changes on the geosphere are unknown, despite a likelihood of climatically-induced changes on weathering and erosion. The lack of long, continuous paleo-records prevents an examination of terrestrial responses to climate change with sufficient detail to answer questions about how systems behaved in the past and may alter in the future. We use high-resolution records of pollen, clay mineralogy, and particle size from a drill core from Lake Malawi, southeast Africa, to examine atmosphere-biosphere-geosphere interactions during the last deglaciation (∼ 18-9 ka), a period of dramatic temperature and hydrologic changes. The results demonstrate that climatic controls on Lake Malawi vegetation are critically important to weathering processes and erosion patterns during the deglaciation. At 18 ka, afromontane forests dominated but were progressively replaced by tropical seasonal forest, as summer rainfall increased. Despite indication of decreased rainfall, drought-intolerant forest persisted through the Younger Dryas (YD) resulting from a shorter dry season. Following the YD, an intensified summer monsoon and increased rainfall seasonality were coeval with forest decline and expansion of drought-tolerant miombo woodland. Clay minerals closely track the vegetation record, with high ratios of kaolinite to smectite (K/S) indicating heavy leaching when forest predominates, despite variable rainfall. In the early Holocene, when rainfall and temperature increased (effective moisture remained low), open woodlands expansion resulted in decreased K/S, suggesting a reduction in chemical weathering intensity. Terrigenous sediment mass accumulation rates also increased, suggesting critical linkages among open vegetation and erosion during intervals of enhanced summer rainfall. This study shows a strong, direct influence of vegetation composition on weathering intensity in the tropics. As climate change will likely impact this interplay between the biosphere and geosphere, tropical landscape change could lead to deleterious effects on soil and water quality in regions with little infrastructure for mitigation.

Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene megadroughts in tropical Africa.

Extremely arid conditions in tropical Africa occurred in several discrete episodes between 135 and 90 ka, as demonstrated by lake core and seismic records from multiple basins [Scholz CA, Johnson TC, Cohen AS, King JW, Peck J, Overpeck JT, Talbot MR, Brown ET, Kalindekafe L, Amoako PYO, et al. (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16416-16421]. This resulted in extraordinarily low lake levels, even in Africa's deepest lakes. On the basis of well dated paleoecological records from Lake Malawi, which reflect both local and regional conditions, we show that this aridity had severe consequences for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. During the most arid phase, there was extremely low pollen production and limited charred-particle deposition, indicating insufficient vegetation to maintain substantial fires, and the Lake Malawi watershed experienced cool, semidesert conditions (<400 mm/yr precipitation). Fossil and sedimentological data show that Lake Malawi itself, currently 706 m deep, was reduced to an approximately 125 m deep saline, alkaline, well mixed lake. This episode of aridity was far more extreme than any experienced in the Afrotropics during the Last Glacial Maximum (approximately 35-15 ka). Aridity diminished after 95 ka, lake levels rose erratically, and salinity/alkalinity declined, reaching near-modern conditions after 60 ka. This record of lake levels and changing limnological conditions provides a framework for interpreting the evolution of the Lake Malawi fish and invertebrate species flocks. Moreover, this record, coupled with other regional records of early Late Pleistocene aridity, places new constraints on models of Afrotropical biogeographic refugia and early modern human population expansion into and out of tropical Africa.