Mapping risk to plant populations from short fire intervals via relationships between maturation period and environmental productivity

An integrated approach to assessing abiotic and biotic threats to post‐fire plant species recovery: Lessons from the 2019–2020 Australian fire season

“…While there may be some cases of urgent ex situ conservation needs (e.g., threatened species management), seed collection should minimize impacts on the in situ seed bank. Essential seed collection should be undertaken with reference to the biology of the species and the productivity of the environment (Gosper et al, in press). In some instances, all seeds held within the canopy (serotiny) may be germinated, predated or burnt in a single fire event and soil seed banks may be similarly exhausted in a single fire (Auld & Denham, 2006).…”

Climate change and altered fire regimes: impacts on plant populations, species, and ecosystems in both hemispheres

“…Some changes will arise from climate-driven alterations to different dimensions of fire regimes, such as increases in severity that are governed by the combination of fire behavior and fire-adaptive (or sensitive) plant traits (Franco et al 2022). Other changes will emerge when shifting fire regimes interact with key demographic and community dynamics pre-fire (Agne et al 2022;Gosper et al 2022;Souto-Veiga et al 2022) and post-fire (Arroyo-Vargas et al 2022;Dawe et al 2022;Brehaut and Brown 2022); some occurring over evolutionary time scales (Lamont 2022;Ladd et al 2022). Finally, some changes will emerge as surprising outcomes from disturbances interacting in a linked (Lindenmayer et al 2022) or compound (Bendall et al 2022) manner.…”

“…Beyond characterizing the temporal window of immaturity risk, how the period of immaturity risk varies spatially-and additional drivers of seed abundance other than ontogeny-are critical factors for identifying locations and contexts at particular risk from fire-catalyzed loss of resilience. By modeling the regional distribution of the juvenile (i.e., reproductively immature) period for a wide range of serotinous obligate seeding species across southwestern Australia, Gosper et al (2022; this issue) contribute an important spatial dimension to understanding immaturity risk (Keeley et al 1999). Importantly, they demonstrate that the juvenile period is predicted to continue lengthening with further climate warming, extending the period of immaturity risk even if fire-return-intervals remain constant.…”

Time since fire shapes plant immaturity risk across fire severity classes

“…Fire directly influences the ability of plants to complete their life cycles and thus shapes plant population dynamics (Baltzer et al 2021;Gosper et al 2022). While many species have fire-related traits (Lamont et al 2020;Lamont et al 2019), ongoing fire regime changes, including higher frequency of severe fires (Collins et al 2022), threaten the ability of plants to complete their life cycles (Gallagher et al 2022;Nolan et al 2022).…”

“…Yet, high-severity fire can also cause seed death and limit seed dispersal, especially when fire temperatures are extreme (Bradstock et al 1994;Gill, Hoecker, and Turner 2021). Studies on plant reproduction after fire do not usually account for fire severity (Brennan and Keeley 2019;Gosper et al 2022), even though fire severity influences recruitment and time to maturity (McCaw 2008). We reason that incorporating both fire severity and time since fire into ecological studies will help to disentangle the influences of the multiple components of the fire regime and understand plant life cycles under future fire regimes.…”