French Guianan coastal savannas: A landscape shaped by humans and by nature
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - 08:21
in Earth & Climate
The coastal savannas of French Guiana dotted with thousands of small mounds have given up some of their secrets, thanks to an interdisciplinary European collaborative research project. The researchers discovered that these mounds are agricultural raised fields, vestiges of a pre-Columbian agricultural system constructed over 900 years ago. Above all, the researchers showed that following the abandonment of this system, these well-drained islands in seasonally flooded environments were colonized by other organisms (animals and plants) that have maintained these small elevated structures up to the present day.