The endemic Uapaca bojeri tree forms patchy savanna woodlands in widely dispersed parts of Madagascar’s central highlands. As a rare wooded landscape in a grassland region in a country otherwise famous for tree loss, tapia has attracted a fair bit of fetishised attention (it also helps that two tapia regions are easy to get to from the capital).
Usually the story is about how these forests, too, are threatened by fire and cutting. In my doctoral work a quarter century ago (ack!) I made a number of arguments about the tapia woodlands that countered that usual story:
- The tapia tree is well adapted to certain fire regimes (I was a bit vague about exactly which)
- Humans have shaped the woodlands with fire, favouring the tapia tree
- People have protected the tapia woodlands for their products (wood, fruit, silk…)
- Tapia woodlands are actually relatively stable in extent
- A key threat is the spread of exotic fast-growing pine trees (I posited shading, soil changes…)
Recently, I was thrilled to get the chance to contribute to Elliot Convery-Fisher’s doctoral research (at the University of Edinburgh) on the same subject. My collection of old aerial photographs that I had lugged from office to office around the world now had a chance to visit Scotland (sadly, I didn’t travel with them). The result is a fantastic paper (Convery-Fisher et al. 2026), out earlier this year, that uses much more sophisticated remote sensing, ground surveys, and much more formalised focus group discussion techniques, across a wider region to test similar questions 25 years later. That study confirms that:
- Tapia woodlands are structurally stable in extent
- Yet, under the canopy stability, species other than tapia are being lost
- Rapid expansion of non-native pines threatens the woodlands
- Local management may be one of the reasons these woodlands still exist; conservation policies should support local people to manage the spread of non-native trees, and restore woodland diversity
Congratulations to Elliot for a high-quality, valuable contribution to this important topic!
References (in reverse-time order)
- Convery‐Fisher, ED, AJM Devenish, S Staddon, CA Kull, FL Rafanomezantsoa, T Randriamboavonjy & CER Lehmann (2026) Stability in tapia woodlands amid non‐native expansion: Integrating traditional ecological knowledge and remote sensing to track 73 years of tree cover in Madagascar. People and Nature 8 (5):1403–1418.
- Kull, CA & CR Birkinshaw (2022) Tapia woodlands. In The New Natural History of Madagascar, edited by Goodman, SM. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 121–126.
- Kull, CA, J Ratsirarson & G Randriamboavonjy (2005) Les forêts de tapia des Hautes Terres malgaches. Tany Malagasy / Terre Malgache No. 24:22–58.
- Kull, CA (2004) Isle of Fire, University of Chicago Press. (has a chapter similar to Kull 2002)
- Kull, CA (2002) The “degraded” tapia woodlands of highland Madagascar: rural economy, fire ecology, and forest conservation. Journal of Cultural Geography 19 (2):95–128.
- Gade, DW (1985) Savanna woodland, fire, protein and silk in highland Madagascar. Journal of Ethnobiology 5 (2):109–122. (by geographer Daniel Gade, one of the inspirations for my own study!)
