P3 Ecology, Paleoecology, and Evolutionary Ecology

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Project P3 - Ecology, Paleoecology and Evolutionary Ecology - of RU 2358 has its focus on the disturbance ecology of Africa’s largest alpine ecosystem, the southern Ethiopian Bale Mountain highlands with its fire-fragmented Erica-thickets, all-year round livestock-grazing, and the landscape-engineering of soil-dwelling rodents. High endemism corroborates ecological stability in evolutionary time scales. The continuous fire record of the last 15.000 years showed the fire-resilience of the Erica thickets and we can assume that the proven occupation of Middle Stone Age hunters since at least 45.000 years has left its fire-footprint in the pattern of alpine dwarf shrublands, Erica-thickets, and mounds of soil-dwelling rodents. The goal, to determine the age of the alpine Anthropocene includes to disentangle the climate and the cultural signal in the charcoal- and pollen-record and to increase plausibility of the origin of fire. The next work packages are (1) extending the paleo-archive beyond the Late Glacial into the times of the first human intrusion, using lake sediments and hyrax middens with the help of charcoal- and pollen analyses and ancient DNA on the landscape level, (2) tracing the spatio-temporal pattern of ecological disturbance, using (3) the assessment of the afroalpine Erica outposts including flowering status, seedlings, drought damages, and sampling for nutrient assessment, and the vegetation dynamics of the endemic flora of rodent’s mounds.