Validation of the role of fire with a restricted dataset.

Models that incorporated only the effects of fire, elephants, or rainfall on per capita tree density change were fitted to photopanorama data from the post-1980 period only (1980–2003 data were used for model fitting). The figure shows how well alternative tree dynamics models fit the pre-1980 photopanorama data (the validation period). The original best-fit model (model 3, fitted to the entire dataset) is also plotted for reference. Each data point represents a mean across multiple sites for a particular time period (a midpoint, see Figure 1E).