There is increased interest in the use of summer-season fires to limit woody plant encroachment into grasslands, but effects of these fires on grasses are poorly understood. We quantified effects of repeated winter fires, repeated summer fires, and clipping (to simulate grazing) on aboveground total yield, live yield, and percentage of live tissue of C3 Texas wintergrass (Nassella leucotricha [...

Fire is known to be an important factor in many ecological systems [Whelan 1995]. In plant communities, the combined effects of opening up space, burning biomass, and releasing nutrients to the soil offer a variety changing environmental conditions. When burns are relatively frequent, and a stable burning regime has persisted on evolutionary time scales, many species develop specific responses ...

1. Variations in disturbance regime strongly influence ecosystem structure and function. A prominent form of such variation is when multiple high-severity wildfires occur in rapid succession (i.e. short-interval (SI) severe fires, or ‘re-burns’). These events have been proposed as key mechanisms altering successional rates and pathways. 2. We utilized a natural experiment afforded by two overla...

The effects of a small fire event at a nuclear power plant can disrupt the supply of electricity to many thousands of customers and loss of feed-in tariffs to the operator. The consequences of a serious fire that causes core damage can affect the health and welfare of millions, perhaps generations of citizens and the environment. Clearly the stakes are very high. Nothing defines 'mission-critic...

Due to frequent fire, low nutrient availability, and prolonged drought, tropical savanna is a stressful environment for the survival and growth of woody plant seedlings. To understand why forest species do not succeed in this environment while savanna species are able to persist, the effects of fire and woody cover on seedlings of these two functional groups were investigated in the Brazilian C...

Australia, the flattest, driest, and geologically oldest vegetated continent, has a uniquely high proportion of nutrient-poor soils. We develop a "Nutrient-Poverty/Intense-Fire Theory," which postulates that most anomalous features of organisms and ecosystems of Australia are the evolutionary consequences of adaptations to nutrient poverty, compounded by intense fire that tends to occur as a re...