TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fer, Istem
A1  - Tietjen, Britta
A1  - Jeltsch, Florian
A1  - Trauth, Martin H.
T1  - Modelling vegetation change during Late Cenozoic uplift of the East African plateaus
JF  - Palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology : an international journal for the geo-sciences
N2  - The present-day vegetation in the tropics is mainly characterized by forests worldwide except in tropical East Africa, where forests only occur as patches at the coast and in the uplands. These forest patches result from the peculiar aridity that is linked to the uplift of the region during the Late Cenozoic. The Late Cenozoic vegetation history of East Africa is of particular interest as it has set the scene for the contemporary events in mammal and hominin evolution. In this study, we investigate the conditions under which these forest patches could have been connected, and a previous continuous forest belt could have extended and fragmented. We apply a dynamic vegetation model with a set of climatic scenarios in which we systematically alter the present-day environmental conditions such that they would be more favourable for a continuous forest belt in tropical East Africa. We consider varying environmental factors, namely temperature, precipitation and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Our results show that all of these variables play a significant role in supporting the forest biomes and a continuous forest belt could have occurred under certain combinations of these settings. With our current knowledge of the palaeoenvironmental history of East Africa, it is likely that the region hosted these conditions during the Late Cenozoic. Recent improvements on environmental hypotheses of hominin evolution highlight the role of periods of short and extreme climate variability during the Late Cenozoic specific to East Africa in driving evolution. Our results elucidate how the forest biomes of East Africa can appear and disappear under fluctuating environmental conditions and demonstrate how this climate variability might be recognized on the biosphere level.
KW  - Dynamic vegetation models
KW  - Palaeovegetation
KW  - Evolution
KW  - Late Cenozoic
KW  - East Africa
KW  - Climate change
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.04.007
SN  - 0031-0182
SN  - 1872-616X
VL  - 467
SP  - 120
EP  - 130
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -