Since first established by Dr. Anderson in 2010, the overarching goal of the savanna dynamics project has been to understand how a wide range of abiotic and biotic drivers shape the vegetation and animal community dynamics of the Serengeti ecosystem. A key focus is to understand the long-term dynamics of key ecosystem properties, such as tree cover, herbaceous biomass, fire, and herbivore spatial distributions.

A core question of the Savanna Dynamics project is: what are the major drivers of savanna structure and function? Much of the work to date has focused on top-down or bottom-up determinants, with less examination of reciprocal influences and interactions between multiple factors. The dominant theoretical models of savanna in the literature assume that fine-scale spatial processes (e.g., recruitment facilitation by tree canopies) are key to savanna maintenance (Menaut et al. 1990, Jeltsch et al. 1998, Higgins et al. 2000, Caylor and Shugart 2004, Meyer et al. 2007, Scanlon et al. 2007), but empirical evidence is sparse; our project explores this assumption. A major obstacle in predicting the vegetation dynamics of ecosystems to future perturbations is our limited understanding of how complex suites of connected and covarying traits change from the past conditions under which they evolved to their current role in stability and resilience of ecosystems. We argue that to understand the present ecological responses of ecosystems we must focus on the historical context of the past evolutionary drivers that have brought them to the present time.

This study will integrate (i) a phylogenetic and phenotypic analysis of dominant savanna trees, (ii) in situ experiments comparing the growth, survival, and physiological responses of key species, and (iii) genetic analyses that will reveal how species have evolved in response to the major drivers of savanna vegetation.