Sub-Saharan Africa has extraordinary biological diversity across a breadth of rangeland habitats. As ecological disturbances, fire and grazing contributed to the evolution of many African rangelands, but current regimes are shaped by human impact and global environmental change. While considerable research documents the negative effects of altered disturbance regimes and land-use change on Africa's biodiversity, relatively little work describes how fire and grazing might be managed such that biodiversity conservation and human land-use can be reconciled. We review existing literature on fire and grazing impacts on non-game wildlife in Sub-Saharan Africa, including invertebrates, herptofauna, small mammals, and birds. Specifically, we focus on the paucity of research attention to spatial and temporal scale of disturbance. We suggest considerations for future work on biodiversity in Sub-Saharan grasslands and savannas, including 1) quantification of fire and grazing as regimes comprised of intensity and frequency, rather than qualitative categories of occurrence; 2) community-level sampling and analysis; 3) consideration of the spatial and temporal patterns of fire and grazing, with particular attention to heterogeneity and patch contrast; and 4) consideration of the interactive effects of fire and grazing, particularly at patch- and landscape-level effects on wildlife communities and habitat structure.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.