Do Mixed Fire Regimes Shape Plant Flammability and Post-Fire Recovery Strategies?

Helen Poulos, Andrew Barton, Jasper Slingsby, David Bowman
2018 Fire  
The development of frameworks for better-understanding ecological syndromes and putative evolutionary strategies of plant adaptation to fire has recently received a flurry of attention, including a new model hypothesizing that plants have diverged into three different plant flammability strategies due to natural selection. We provide three case studies of pyromes/taxa (Pinus, the Proteaceae of the Cape Floristic Region, and Eucalyptus) that, contrary to model assumptions, reveal that plant
more » ... es often exhibit traits of more than one of these flammability and post-fire recovery strategies. We propose that such multiple-strategy adaptations have been favoured as bet-hedging strategies in response to selective pressure from mixed-fire regimes experienced by these species over evolutionary time.
doi:10.3390/fire1030039 fatcat:kdt4kp6kpjgapmtzybjwmmxlf4