Sarah Ivory
Penn State University
Dynamics of abrupt change in tropical African forests
Tropical forests provide essential resources, including food, fuel, and medicine, to millions of people in Africa as well as having links to ecosystem services that include fisheries and freshwater. Abrupt changes in ecosystems have the potential to occur on human timescales. Although paleoecological data is well suited to answering questions about the timing and pace of vegetation change, detecting spatial patterns requires a network of sites that is often inaccessible. Until recently, data availability in Africa was too limited to evaluate tipping points in Afrotropical forests that would strain adaptive capacity in this region. However, recent advances in legacy data standardization following FAIR data standards have made it possible to pose scientific questions about past ecosystem change that were previously not possible in Africa. In order to this, the African Pollen Database (APD) has recently been relaunched as a constituent database within the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and newly developed open-access tools were used to identify abrupt change events since the Last Glacial Maximum (21ka).