Late Quaternary Montane Forest Dynamics From Equatorial East Africa: A Biome Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Aim Understanding environmental change over large spatial and temporal scales requires working at a broad ecological scale to enable cross‐site comparisons. This allows data‐based comparisons to dynamic vegetation model outputs, with utility for climate and land cover modelling. We synthesise multisite pollen data at the biome level to understand Equatorial Afromontane ecosystem response to climate change over the last 50,000 years and quantitatively document the timing, character and spatial patterns of ecosystem transitions. Location Mountains of Equatorial East Africa. Time Period Late Quaternary (50,000 cal year BP–present). Taxon Angiosperms (trees, shrubs and grasses), gymnosperms (conifers), pteridophytes (ferns) and bryophytes (clubmosses). Methods A literature review revealed 58 available published pollen sites from Equatorial East African Mountains. Original geochronological and palynological data were collated from 34 sites from the African Pollen Database (APD) and directly from authors. Pollen taxonomies were updated and harmonised using the African Plant Database. The geochronologies were reanalysed and radiocarbon data ( n = 219) were IntCal20 calibrated to develop linearly interpolated age‐depth models. The 636 pollen taxa were grouped into 21 plant functional types and combined into seven biomes that represent the range of montane ecosystems. A rate of change analysis at each site provided a scale of the change through time at each site. Results Mesic montane forest biomes were present throughout the 50,000 cal year BP. Cold and dry montane biomes expanded during and after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Warm and wet forest biomes expanded from the early Holocene and more open biomes expanded in the Late Holocene. Regional differences were observed, such as the Eastern Arc Mountain sites recording relatively little change in comparison with isolated volcanic mountains. The rate of change analysis highlights periods with a high rate of change (45,000–35,000, 11,000–5000 and 5000–present) while 35,000–20,000 is relatively stable. Main Conclusions Equatorial East African Montane forests are driven by local to regional vegetation responses to past climate changes. The research highlights that both the pace and nature of interactions in ecological systems vary widely across these montane forests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".