Probabilistic Spatial and Temporal Resilience Landscapes for the Congo Basin

Recent research by Hirota et al. (2011) introduced the concept of resilience landscapes for tropical forests and savannahs. Basically, the approach statistically relates the probability of current forest/savannah occurrence with the concept of tipping points, at which the ecosystem has no other choice except to switch from on stable state (e.g., forest) to its alternative stable state (e.g., savannah) or vice versa. This work will use a biogeochemical modelling approach to establish such probabilistic resilience landscapes for the Congo Basin rainforest biome. In a first step, the occurrence of tipping points will be related to climate features like annual precipitation, dry season length, occurrence of startiform non-precipitating cloud cover and the inter-annual variation in precipitation. In the second, spatial resilience landscapes for the Congo Basin will be provided using present climate conditions. Their relation to current forest/savannah distribution will be assessed and evident congruencies and discrepancies will be discussed. In a third step, the concept of temporal resilience landscapes will be developed along the patch-level life cycle dynamics of the Congo Basin rainforest biome. In a final step, the implications of results for ecosystem management decision will be assessed and possible implications on policy and land-use decisions will be presented