Abstract
The savannas cover extensive areas of the American tropics, and, together with rain forests, are the most extended neotropical plant formations. Ecological interpretation of these savannas has been quite divergent due partly to the word “savanna” being applied to completely different ecosystems. Even when limited by a definition like Beard’s (1953), it still includes a wide variety of physiognomic types and floristic units under different climatic, topographic, soil conditions, and degrees of human interference. Furthermore, the difficulty in distinguishing secondary herbaceous communities from primary savannas, as well as delimiting savannas and open forests, helps make the interpretation more confused.
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Sarmiento, G., Monasterio, M. (1975). A Critical Consideration of the Environmental Conditions Associated with the Occurrence of Savanna Ecosystems in Tropical America. In: Golley, F.B., Medina, E. (eds) Tropical Ecological Systems. Ecological Studies, vol 11. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-88533-4_16
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