Editorial |
Corresponding author: Jürgen Dengler ( dr.juergen.dengler@gmail.com ) Academic editor: Florian Jansen
© 2024 Reginald T. Guuroh, Leslie R. Brown, Miguel Alvarez, Manfred Finckh, Ute Schmiedel, Gaolathe Tsheboeng, Jürgen Dengler.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Guuroh RT, Brown LR, Alvarez M, Finckh M, Schmiedel U, Tsheboeng G, Dengler J (2024) African vegetation studies: introduction to a Special Collection. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 279-288. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.143360
|
Abstract: This editorial introduces the Special Collection of “African Vegetation Studies”. The collection includes seven research papers from four African countries. One paper examines the impact of traditional agro-ecosystems on plant diversity in Morocco. In Benin, one research paper focuses on vegetation associations in a biosphere reserve, and another is on land cover changes on inselbergs. In Namibia, one paper provides a syntaxonomic description of the Karstveld vegetation, while another models potential vegetation changes along a south-north rainfall gradient. Two papers present research on vegetation classification and descriptions of two natural areas in South Africa, namely the Tankwa Karoo National Park and the Telperion Nature Reserve. The collection demonstrates that there are important classification studies ongoing in different parts of the continent to better understand the diversity and complexity of African vegetation. At the same time our mini-review of the current status of vegetation classification and vegetation-plot databases in Africa highlights that much work remains to be done to achieve a comprehensive and internationally consistent vegetation classification for the countries of Africa, which would be beneficial for land use management, biodiversity conservation and ecological research.
Abbreviations: EVA = European Vegetation Archive; EVS = European Vegetation Survey; GDP = Gross Domestic Product; IAVS = International Association for Vegetation Science; IAVS-AS = IAVS Regional Section for Africa; VCS = Vegetation Classification and Survey.
Africa, editorial, International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), phytosociology, remote sensing, vegetation classification, vegetation map, vegetation-plot database
Africa, the world’s second largest continent, is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean and is almost equally divided by the equator. It covers an area of 30.3 million km2 (including adjacent islands such as Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Comoros). It is also the second most populous continent after Asia. With 53 countries, Africa has more countries than any other continent in the world.
Africa is characterized by a great diversity of vegetation types and ecosystems.
Although some research on African vegetation has been published, data on the African flora and vegetation remains relatively poorly documented compared to other regions such as Europe and the Americas (
In 2021, the journal Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) and the African Section of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS-AS) partnered to launch a Special Collection dedicated to “African Vegetation Studies”. The aim of this Special Collection was to provide new case studies of vegetation classifications across the African continent. The vegetation typologies could be of any kind, for example based on vegetation plots or remote sensing data. Likewise, the papers could develop a new classification system for a certain vegetation type in a particular region, or use an existing vegetation typology in applied research, e.g. related to global change. This editorial begins with an overview of the current knowledge on vegetation types in Africa and the available databases, followed by summaries of the articles in the Special Collection, and ends with conclusions and future perspectives.
At the continental scale, only rather coarse physiognomic classifications exist for Africa, namely the one by
Studies at finer physiognomic scales, or even at community level based on vegetation plots, exist only in some regions of some countries. Below we provide a rough overview of the current state in four broad regions of Africa where at least one of the authors has some insight. We have excluded Central Africa and Madagascar, where we are not aware of any classification study (except
The francophone countries of NW Africa (Morocco, Algeria) have a considerable tradition of phytosociological vegetation classification, mainly carried out by researchers from France, but sometimes also from other European countries. They mostly focused on the climax vegetation, i.e. forests and steppes (e.g.
Major vegetation studies conducted in the West African region include the BIOTA (Biodiversity Monitoring Transect Analysis in Africa) West project, the SUN project and the UNDESERT project, which have resulted in numerous publications on the vegetation of West Africa and vegetation databases such as the West African Vegetation (http://www.westafricanvegetation.org/menu/home.aspx) and the West African plants photo guide (http://www.westafricanplants.senckenberg.de/root/index.php). A comprehensive description of the vegetation of West Africa was provided by
East Africa does not have a strong tradition of vegetation classification, and we are not aware of any country with a comprehensive overview of fine-scale vegetation types. Recently, however, some specialized studies of wetlands have been published (
For South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini, a comprehensive and detailed vegetation typology with accompanying maps has been published by
A similar approach was used for a vegetation map of Namibia by
Since 1997, several datasets on plant collection records in Africa have been established (
In contrast, the availability of vegetation plots in databases is rather low. When the global vegetation plot database sPlot 2.1 (
The VCS Special Collection comprises seven articles from four countries in northern, western and southern Africa (Figure
Spatial distribution of the seven articles in the Special Collection “African vegetation studies”. The photos stem from the seven studies:
The above review, though certainly not comprehensive and regionally biased, demonstrates that the scientific knowledge of the vegetation of Africa is still extremely incomplete. Continental overviews are very coarse and not particularly up to date. Only a few countries have a comprehensive overview of the vegetation types on their territory, namely Morocco (
We believe that the African Section of the International Association for Vegetation Science (https://www.iavs.org/page/working-groups_africa-section) could play an important role in this regard. To move forward, we consider the following aspects to be crucial:
What can be achieved by a few decades of cross-country cooperation among the vegetation scientists of an entire continent, even in the absence of major funding, can be seen in Europe. There, a few visionary scientists founded the European Vegetation Survey (EVS), like the African Section a subgroup of the IAVS (
This view of the neighbouring continent does not suggest that Africa should do everything in the same way. Obviously, Africa is a much larger continent and, as mentioned above, currently has far fewer financial resources than Europe. On the other hand, we now have much more advanced IT tools (shared documents in the cloud, large databases, powerful modelling techniques, remote sensing, artificial intelligence) available than at the start of EVS. In addition, African scientists have the advantage of learning what has worked in Europe and what has proved to be a drawback in development. Aiming for methodological standardization at an early stage, rather than reinventing the wheel, would certainly allow things to be done faster and more efficiently than in Europe. The BIOTA approach developed for Africa could provide some elements (
RTG and LB planned the outline with major inputs by JD. All authors contributed to portions of the draft, improved and approved the manuscript.
We thank the authors and reviewers who made this Special Collection possible. Further, we are grateful to the Map Library, Department of Geography, University of South Africa, for compiling Figure