Journal Title
Title of Journal: Plant Ecol
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Abbravation: Plant Ecology
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Publisher
Springer Netherlands
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Authors: Shimane W Makhabu Christina Skarpe Håkan Hytteborn Zenzele D Mpofu
Publish Date: 2005/11/16
Volume: 184, Issue: 1, Pages: 163-172
Abstract
The way herbivores select what to eat is of considerable practical and theoretical interest and has given rise to different theories and hypotheses The plant vigour hypothesis predicts that herbivores feed preferentially on vigorous ie large and/or fastgrowing plants or plant parts These predictions have previously primarily been tested on variation within plant species Here we test whether differences in vigour among plant species in the same environment can explain differences in herbivore attack We studied variation in browsing pressure by a guild of large herbivores on different woody species in an African savanna ecosystem Shoot growth rate annual shoot length basal shoot diameter and annual shoot volume of 14 woody plant species were measured in the field Plant species’ shoot vigour represented by the first PCA axis scores generated from the four shoot variables were then related to browsing pressure utilisation on each of the species by native ungulates and elephant Nutrient and fibre concentrations and tannin activity were also determined for the 14 woody plant species We found ungulate browsing pressure to show a unimodal relationship with plant species’ shoot vigour The heaviest browsing pressure was on plant species with shoots of intermediate vigour We suggest that species with less vigorous shoots had low nutrient and high fibre concentrations and offered small bite sizes whereas species with vigorous shoots had high nutrient concentrations but larger shoot diameters than the bite diameters of browsing ungulates Elephant browsing pressure was not related to plant species’ shoot vigourWe are grateful to Tuulikki Rooke for letting us use her data on tannin activity The staff of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks assisted with fieldwork Thanks to the Director of Agricultural Research Botswana for the permission to use the Plant analysis laboratory at Sebele Thanks to Bård Pedersen for his advice on statistics This work was part of the BotswanaNorway Institutional Cooperation and Capacity Building Project BONIC jointly funded by the Botswana Government and Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation NORAD
Keywords:
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- Regional and local variation in seedling emergence, mortality and recruitment of a perennial herb in Mediterranean mountain habitats
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