INTRODUCTION Though animal-related injuries and fatalities have been documented throughout the world, the variety of attacks by wild animals native to rural East Africa are less commonly described. Given the proximity of our northwestern Tanzania hospital to Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, and the Serengeti National Park, and presentation of several patients attacked by bush animals and sufferi...

Globally there is increasing concern over the biodiversity and economic losses associated with bush encroachment. The dominant species responsible for encroachment in Africa belong to mimosoid genera Senegalia Vachellia, previous research identifying Vachellia as more aggressive invader. We asked whether these have evolved different traits enable germination establishment among competitively su...

Savannas are characterized by the coexistence of two contrasting plant life-forms: woody and herbaceous vegetation. During last decades, there has been a global trend an increase in cover spread shrubs trees into areas that were previously dominated grasses. This process, termed bush encroachment, is associated with severe losses ecosystem functions typically difficult to reverse. It assumed be...

Abstract Context Habitat loss and alteration affect wildlife populations worldwide. Bush encroachment alters landscapes threatens arid semi-arid grasslands, but its effects on predator–prey relationships carnivore community ecology are not well understood. Predation strategies of large predators, for example high-speed pursuits versus ambush from short distances, likely to be affected different...

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of repeated dry season annual hot fires on woody plants in a semi-arid southern African savanna in Zimbabwe. Parts of the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) research fields in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe have been burnt annually in the dry season between 1994 and 2003 in order to control bush encroachment. The present study was...

Bush encroachment is a form of land degradation prominent worldwide, but particularly present in semi-arid areas. In this study, we mapped the spatial distribution of the two encroacher species, Acacia mellifera and Acacia reficiens, in Central Namibia, based on their different phenological behavior. We used constrained principal curves to extract a one dimensional gradient of phenological chan...

Fires play an important role in determining the composition and structure of vegetation in semiarid ecosystems. The study of the interactions between fire and vegetation requires a stochastic approach because of the random and unpredictable nature of fire occurrences. To this end, this article develops a minimalist probabilistic framework to investigate the impact of intermittent fire occurrenc...