I am interested in plant diversity in Angola and the environmental factors that shape vegetation, with a particular interest in frost and fire.
It is always assumed that fire is a natural factor in all African grassland ecosystems. However, at least the timing of fires is nowadays controlled by people who use fire with different objectives for land use. To disentangle the seasonal effects of fire, we have installed systematic fire experiments in three openland ecosystems in central Angola to investigate the influence of different fire timings on functional types such as grasses, geoxyles, and trees. For this, we measure changes in species composition and cover, as well as response variables such as the number of inflorescences of grasses, and leaf or shoot length of dicotyledonous plants. Results may help local stakeholders to better manage species rich tropical grasslands in terms of biodiversity conservation.
