Jens-Christian Svenning

The extent of vegetation openness in past European landscapes is widely debated. In particular, the temperate forest biome has traditionally been defined as dense, closed-canopy forest; however, some argue that large herbivores maintained greater openness or even wood-pasture conditions. Here, we address this question for the Last Interglacial period (129,000–116,000 years ago), before Homo sapiens –linked megafauna declines and anthropogenic landscape transformation. We applied the vegetation reconstruction method REVEALS to 96 Last Interglacial pollen records. We found that light woodland and open vegetation represented, on average, more than 50% cover during this period. The degree of openness was highly variable and only partially linked to climatic factors, indicating the importance of natural disturbance regimes. Our results show that the temperate forest biome was historically heterogeneous rather than uniformly dense, which is consistent with the dependency of much of contemporary European biodiversity on open vegetation and light woodland.

African wildlife populations are declining at an alarming rate. To stop further population declines and restore ecosystems, more areas for wildlife are needed. Community‐based conservation with wildlife‐livestock coexistence in the vast rangelands of Africa presents a major opportunity. However, the efficacy of wildlife conservation in mixed land‐use areas remains an outstanding question. To assess the ecological outcomes of land‐sharing between regulated livestock herds and wildlife populations in African savannas, we test how rotational cattle grazing affects spatiotemporal dynamics of 15 large herbivore species in the Maasai Mara, Kenya. First, we tested how wild herbivore distributions across the Greater Mara Ecosystem (the Mara, ~2600 km 2 ) are related to cattle density and environmental variables using 584,561 observations of wild herbivores (ecosystem scale). In a second analysis, we tested how rotational cattle grazing affects wild herbivore distributions in a 300 km 2 subsection of the Mara using 30,583 observations (landscape scale). Finally, we tested how functional traits of wild herbivores affect species‐level spatiotemporal responses to cattle grazing. At the ecosystem scale, the presence of five wild herbivore species was positively correlated with cattle density, while cattle effects on wild herbivore abundances were species‐dependent with both increases and decreases. At the landscape scale, rotational cattle grazing strongly impacted the spatiotemporal habitat selection of wild herbivores, resulting in distinct lag periods with which different species are attracted to areas previously grazed by cattle. These lag periods were linked to functional traits, with body mass and herd size explaining 35% of the interspecific differences. Small to medium‐sized herbivores with large herds select areas recently grazed by cattle, whereas large species with large herd sizes and small species with small herd sizes avoid recently grazed areas. Synthesis and applications : Our results revealed that the effect of cattle on wild herbivores varies considerably among species, suggesting that cattle‐wildlife interactions range from facilitation to competition. To maintain species that strongly avoid cattle, designated livestock‐free zones remain essential, also in rotational grazing systems. Rotational grazing systems with regulated livestock densities present an important opportunity to better manage wildlife‐livestock coexistence and thus improve wildlife conservation in African rangelands.