Event Title : The multi-faceted impacts of ungulate herbivores in savanna ecosystems
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Large ungulate herbivores are integral components of savanna and grassland ecosystems worldwide, and play critical roles in regulating community and ecosystem processes in these systems. Here, I leverage an ongoing long-term herbivore exclusion experiment in a semi-arid savanna ecosystem in Kenya to assess how ungulates impact savanna structure and function across a range of organizational scales – from responses at the individual plant level, to woody plant demography, tree-grass balance, community composition, and biomass and carbon cycling. I then discuss the implications of these results for the management of savanna ecosystems and highlight our planned future work in this semi-arid ecosystem.