The Ungulate Herbivory Under Rainfall Uncertainty (UHURU) Project
At the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya, our work centers on a long-term experiment, dubbed UHURU for “Ungulate Herbivory Under Rainfall Uncertainty.”
Established in 2008 by Jake Goheen, Todd Palmer, and Rob Pringle, the experiment comprises four treatments, each applied to nine replicate 1-ha plots. The treatments exclude successively smaller-bodied subsets of the large-herbivore fauna using electrified fencing, thereby simulating a process of size-biased extinction.
UHURU comprises four 1-ha exclusion treatments, each replicated nine times in blocks like the one shown here. There are three blocks in each of three sites, from the arid north to the mesic south.
Megaherbivore-exclusion fences remove only elephants and giraffes; mesoherbivore-exclusion fences remove all species larger than ~40kg (including eight species of bovids and equids, along with elephants and giraffes); total-exclusion fences exclude all herbivores larger than ~5kg (the diminutive dik-dik, along with all larger species). For comparison with these fenced plots, we have a set of unfenced control plots that is accessible to all species.
The 36 total plots are distributed across a natural rainfall gradient, enabling us to study how the strength and direction of herbivores’ effects depend on climate; similarly, the longitudinal dataset from this experiment will enable us to assess the impacts of droughts and other environmental fluctuations.
This unique experimental setup, offers scope to address a diverse array of ecological questions. Recent work has addressed the impacts of large herbivores on understory plants , trees, small mammals, insects, and ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and organic matter decomposition.
We published raw data from the first five years of UHURU, to make this high-resolution dataset available to other researchers (Kartzinel et al. 2014).
Special thanks to our collaborators
This project graciously supported by
