Limited climatic space for alternative ecosystem states in Africa

A foundational premise of ecology is that climate determines ecosystems. This has been challenged by alternative ecosystem state models, which illustrate that internal ecosystem dynamics acting on the initial ecosystem state can overwhelm the influence of climate and by observations suggesting that climate cannot reliably discriminate forest and savanna ecosystem types. We show that climatic suitability indices can predict forest and savanna in Africa thereby reasserting the dominant influence of climate as a predictor of ecosystem state.