Explicit tests for models of ecosystem collapse in late Holocene Madagascar
by
David A. Burney
Department of Biological Sciences, Fordham University

In the last two millennia, Madagascar has lost its entire endemic megafauna, including giant lemurs, pygmy hippos, elephant birds, and giant tortoises. As the planet’s most recent prehistoric extinction event encompassing a megafauna with continental-scale diversity, this large island offers one of the best opportunities for testing the six types of hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the remarkable global pattern of extinctions and other biotic transformations that have occurred in the wake of human expansion. Coring and excavation throughout the island has yielded a rich record of evidence concerning human arrival, resource exploitation, fire occurrence, vegetation change, climate variability, biological invasion, extreme marine and geological events, and other ecological dynamics. Integrating these results at the landscape level has allowed explicit testing of models proposed for prehistoric environmental change and extinction by focusing on the expectations concerning the ecological rates, patterns, and inferred processes that have been generated by competing hypotheses.

Date received: March 18, 2002

Copyright © 2002 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caiq-80.