University of Bristol
Biological Sciences

What if environmental conservation not only sought to protect ecosystems, but also supported them to persist through global environmental change? Under the growing stressors of climate and land use changes, we could prioritize ecosystems at the greatest risk of irreversible impacts and intervene to increase their stability. The supply of important ecosystem benefits would not be hampered, and limited resources could be deployed efficiently and equitably. My vision is to boost our understanding of how complex ecosystems facing global environmental stressors remain stable.

This vision is especially lacking in the tropical savanna biome. Centuries of colonial “forest-centric” (mis)management have left this biome misunderstood, neglected and threatened. Savannas have biodiversity rivaling that of tropical forests, are one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sinks, and directly support the livelihoods of up to a third of the world’s population. Yet we know little about how stable this biome will remain under global environmental pressures, limiting our ability to conserve it.

It is difficult to analyze the stability of this complex biome due to a lack of long-term vegetation information, inadequate accounting for feedbacks between environmental stressors and unknown causal mechanisms of vegetation stability. For example, how and why does savanna stability vary across continents? How do interacting stressors affect stability? Which plant characteristics explain tolerance of stressors and why? Until we answer these questions, environmental conservation policies and practices will often fail to “stick”.

As an 1851 fellow, I will determine the (in)stability of the tropical savanna biome to climate and land use pressures at the pantropical, landscape and local scales. In collaboration with world leading experts in resilience and recovery of complex systems and a network of region-specific savanna experts, I will first establish a global baseline of tropical savanna stability. Second, I will create a first-of-its-kind map of vulnerable hotspots of savanna instability considering future climate change and socioeconomic pressures. Third, I will establish and test a unified framework of savanna vegetation characteristics responsible for stability. Hence, I will transform our understanding of the stability of the tropical savanna biome thereby supporting successful, efficient and timely conservation policy and practice.