New research suggests the dirt mounds created by termites could be preventing deserts from spreading into semi-arid ecosystems, making these areas more resilient to climate change.
Termite mounds can store nutrients and moisture in the underground tunnels they conceal, allowing water to better-penetrate the ground, the National Science Foundation reported. These mounds slow the spread of deserts into drylands, and drylands with termite mounds can survive on significantly less rain than those without.
"This study demonstrates that termite mounds create important refugia for plants and help to protect vast landscapes in Africa from the effects of drought," said Doug Levey, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
There are five distinct stages of plant growth mark the transition from grasslands or savannas to desert; the last of these stages being the transition from drylands to desert. Study of the termite mounds has shown vegetation patterns that could have been interpreted as the onset of desertification may actually indicate thriving vegetation. The findings suggest other mound-building creatures such as prairie dogs and gophers could also play important ecological roles
"Exactly what each type of animal does for vegetation is hard to know in advance. You'd have to get into a system and determine what is building the mounds and what the properties of the mounds are," said Robert Pringle, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Princeton and co-author of the paper. "I like to think of termites as linchpins of the ecosystem in more than one way. They increase the productivity of the system, but they also make it more stable and more resilient."
The researchers used a mathematical model to determine how these types of creatures influenced plant growth.
"Models such as this allow us to study the system with almost no constraint of time or space and explore a wide range of environmental conditions with a level of detail that can't be attained in the field," Bonachela said.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Science.
