Plant diversification through crop rotation or agroforestry is a promising way to improve sustainability of agroecosystems. Nonetheless, criteria to select the most suitable plant communities for agroecosystems diversification facing contrasting environmental constraints need to be refined. Here, we compared the impacts of 24 different plant communities on soil fertility across six tropical agroecosystems: either on highly weathered Ferralsols, with strong P limitation, or on partially weathered soils derived from volcanic material, with major N limitation....

Microhabitat preference among primates, which provides them with the niche they need to survive, often conditions primate diversity, abundance, and coexistence. Vegetation alteration and recovery have built heterogeneous forest landscapes that may influence primates’ microhabitat preference. We compared the diversity and size of trees/shrubs and the presence of lianas in 132 sites where we captured the rufous mouse lemur (Microcebus rufus), with that of 240 sites where we did not capture this species, to investigate...

Variable tree cover characterizes tropical grassy biomes. Light availability in the ground layer becomes increasingly limited as tree cover increases while open canopy environments are associated with a flammable grassy ground layer. Grass species dominating the ground layer of these ecosystems have adopted strategies to persist and proliferate with frequent fire. However, there is limited understanding of how grass growth and flammability traits respond to changes in light availability. We experimentally grew 14 grass species...

Recently expanded estimates for when humans arrived on Madagascar (up to ~10,000 years ago) highlight questions about the causes of the island’s relatively late megafaunal extinctions (~2000-500 years ago). Introduced domesticated animals could have contributed to extinctions, but the arrival times and past diets of exotic animals are poorly known. To conduct the first explicit test of the potential for competition between introduced livestock and extinct endemic megafauna in southern and western Madagascar, we generated...