Figure 5
From: The consequences of replacing wildlife with livestock in Africa
Herbivore effects on biogeochemical cycling. Shifts in herbivore community composition have altered (a) methane emissions and (b) lateral nutrient diffusion capacity across sub-Saharan Africa (both at 0.5° spatial grain). The relationship between rainfall and methane emissions (c) broadly reflects the overall dependence of herbivore biomass on rainfall (Fig. 1), with cattle-dominated communities now producing a higher peak in drier regions than in the past, but falling below past levels in wetter areas that were historically dominated by elephants. Total methane emissions for sub-Saharan Africa (d) are now considerably higher than in the past, while there have been marked decreases in nutrient diffusion capacity (e). In (e), box shows the median and interquartile range of nutrient diffusion capacity for all sub-Saharan Africa 0.5° cells, and whiskers extend to the most extreme data point which is no more than 1.5 times the interquartile range. The maps were generated using R version 3.3.393 (www.R-project.org) and QGIS 2.4.0.94 (www.qgis.org).
