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 13 burn a grazing sward DHJanzen100781.jpg high resolution
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| When the dry season fire ran across a grazing sward, the vegetation was often so sparse and so low that there was not even a complete burn, as in this photograph. Under these circumstances, the pasture advanced only very slowly into the forest patches following dry (a.k.a. drought) rainy seasons (owing to a less dense canopy allowing more sun into the understory and hence more new herbaceous fuel and less decomposition of the litter), and the forest advanced into the pastures following very wet rainy seasons (when seedlings established well in the pasture margins and saplings grew well). This equilibrium between cattle/pasture and forest fragments had existed for centuries in the ACG dry forest. | ||
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