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Banquet
For
updated information please go the the "Program/Events"
section of the website
Banquet
Speaker
Dr.
William J. Bond
Professor, Department of Botany
University of Cape Town, South Africa
"Fitting
fire into global ecology"
The textbooks tell us that global
biome distribution is largely determined by climate with local modification
by soils. However large areas of the globe support far too few trees
for their climate potential to grow woody biomass. They include
some of the most frequently burnt areas on earth. I will discuss
recent evidence for fire as a primary determinant of these ‘open’
ecosystems, their evolutionary origins and conflicting ideas on
when, where and why fire became important in terrestrial ecosystems.
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