The fynbos is a low, shrubby habitat home to mind-blowing plant diversity: more than 7,000 species, most of which are found nowhere else in the world.
Interested in what factors organize nature at very broad scales, ecologist Lars Hedin and his colleagues wanted to look at places where environmental changes over time can flip the ecosystem between two distinct states. : more than 7,000 species, most of which are found nowhere else in the world .
“The boundary is as sharp as one meter. It’s like a binary, zero to one transition,” says study coauthor Mingzhen Lu, an ecologist at the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico. This is far narrower than the transition zone between savanna and tropical rainforest, he says, which can occur over many kilometers.
Below the surface, the story becomes even clearer. The fynbos plants have long, thin roots that act like nutrient-seeking missiles, snaking through the soil where other roots can’t reach. The median root tip thickness in the fynbos plant community is about 0.1 millimeters, or around one-quarter to one-half the thickness of any other root system in the world. “The thickest fynbos roots are still thinner than the thinnest [Afro-temperate] forest roots,” Lu says.
A fire lily emerges after a fire in the highly nutrient-starved soils of South Africa’s fynbos ecosystem.The fynbos-forest borders waver over the years between fire cycles, with the wet forest mostly rebuffing the flames and the fynbos eventually casting out trespassers.
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