Special Issue on Dynamics of the Global Savanna and Grasslands Biomes

1. Summation

Savanna and grassland biomes cover more of the earth’s surface than any other biome type, and yet they are still largely understudied. In recent decades, global savanna and grassland ecosystems have become more prominent in the literature focused on global change dynamics. Savanna and grasslands represent unique biomes with their own challenges, both in terms of their study and in terms of their complexity, leading to many contradictory and often controversial findings. The global threats to these systems are potentially significant—from climate change impacts to human management challenges, from possible degradation to complete desertification, and looking across varied disturbance regime shifts.

This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Dynamics of Global Savanna and Grassland Biomes”, is intended for a wide and interdisciplinary audience, and covers recent advances around the themes of drivers of vegetation dynamics, further understanding carbon interactions in these critical landscapes, advances in modeling both current and future system states, tipping points in savanna systems, human-environment interactions and challenges for management, and biodiversity and ecosystem services.

This Special Issue includes five published papers with novel insights that span a number of specific topics: modeling effects of climate change on the productivity of rangelands in Zimbabwe [1], understanding the health of savanna vegetation in and around national parks in Southern Africa and Belize over time [2,3], a long-term field study assessing the effects of restoration efforts on degraded meadow steppes in northern China [4], and commentary on socio-environmental dynamics of alpine grasslands in western China [5].