A 90,000-year record of Afromontane forest responses to climate change

Anne-Marie Lézine (1) , Kenji Izumi (2) , Masa Kageyama (2, 3) , Gaston Achoundong (4)

1 VALCO - Variabilité à long terme du climat de l'océan
2 LSCE - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement [Gif-sur-Yvette]
3 CLIM - Modélisation du climat
4 Herbier National du Cameroun

Pollen records from African highlands are scarce; hence, the paleoecology of the Afromontane forest and its responses to glacial cycles are poorly known. Lake Bambili (Cameroon) provides a record of vegetation changes in the tropical mountains of Africa over the past 90,000 years, with high temporal resolution. Pollen data and biome reconstructions show a diverging response of forests to climate changes; the upper tree line was extremely unstable, shifting substantially in response to glacial-interglacial climate alternation, whereas the transition between the montane and lowland forests remained remarkably stable. Such ecological instability may have had a critical influence on species richness in the Afromontane forests.

Domaines: Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]

Anne-Marie Lézine, Kenji Izumi, Masa Kageyama, Gaston Achoundong. A 90,000-year record of Afromontane forest responses to climate change. Science, 2019, 363 (6423), pp.177-181. ⟨10.1126/science.aav6821⟩. ⟨hal-01990873⟩