Population regulation and climate change: the future of Africa's antelope

The impacts of global climate change on Africa's antelope represent a major threat to their long-term survival, yet remain largely unaddressed. This chapter focuses on how environmental gradients such as rainfall determine the abundance and distribution of different African herbivores, and proposes a framework to logically project how climate change may affect antelope populations in the future. The question in this chapter is how might long-term climate changes affect the future of African antelope? The approach is a logical progression of questions: how do common environmental gradients such as rainfall alter the quality and quantity of forage? What determines and/or mediates the impact of predation on populations of herbivores? This line of questions provides a framework from which we can surmise how shifts in key environmental factors such as rainfall might favour certain species over others, and which species might be most affected by concurrent habitat fragmentation and climate change