PREMISE OF THE STUDY Serpentine soils have attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists for decades because of their high number of rare and endemic taxa, though less is known about the ecological factors that govern the diversity and composition of serpentine communities. Theory suggests that vegetation on these low-productivity soils will be relatively resilient to fire, the most common...

Studies of palaeofire rely on quantifying the abundance of fossil charcoals in sediments to estimate changes in fire activity. However, gaining an understanding of the behaviour of palaeofires is also essential if we are to determine the palaeoecological impact of wildfires. Here, I use experimental approaches to explore relationships between litter fire behaviour and leaf traits that are obser...

Downed logs are known to increase species diversity in many forest ecosystems by increasing resource and structural complexity and by altering fire behavior in fire-prone ecosystems. In a frequently burned oak savanna in central Missouri, combustion of downed logs formed patches that have remained free of herbaceous vegetation for more than 3 years. To assess the influence of ‘‘log burnouts’’ o...

Soil respiration is one of the major carbon (C) fluxes between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere and plays an important role in regulating the responses of ecosystem and global C cycling to natural and anthropogenic perturbations. A field experiment was conducted between April 2005 and October 2006 in a semiarid grassland in northern China to examine effects of topography, fire, nitroge...

In ecosystems with frequent surface fires, fire and fuel heterogeneity at relevant scales have been largely ignored. This could be because complete burns give an impression of homogeneity, or due to the difficulty in capturing fine-scale variation in fuel characteristics and fire behaviour. Fire movement between patches of fuel can have implications for modelling fire spread and understanding e...

Management practices that create early successional plant communities through disturbance (discing and prescribed fire) often are prescribed for restoration of declining northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) populations. Because disturbance may facilitate invasion of exotic flora and fauna such as red imported fire ants (RIFA, Solenopsis invicta), we hypothesized that habitat management pract...

Interactions between species are evolutionary malleable and may suffer changes in small timescales. Environmental disturbances, such as fire, can deeply affect species interactions, but how they influence the outcome of a mutualistic interaction has yet to be studied. In order to test the hypothesis that an environmental disturbance, in this case fire, may produce differences in the outcome of ...

Dead plant tissues and ash from a prescribed fire play an important role in nutrient balance and cycling in the Florida Everglades ecosystem. The objective of this study was to assess the dynamic changes in total phosphorus release (TPr) from ash or tissues of either cattail (Typha domingensis Pers.) or sawgrass (Cladium jamaicense Crantz) to water. Natural-dead (senesced-dead) and burning-dead...

A spatially explicit landscape model of disturbance and vegetation succession, LANDIS, was used to examine the effect of fire regime on landscape patterns of functional group dominance in the shrublands and forests of the southern California foothills and mountains. Three model treatments, frequent (35 year), moderate (70 year), and infrequent (1050 year) fire cycles, were applied to the landsc...

The aim of this paper was to provide an overview of the current state of the art on research into the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) from vegetation fires. Significant amounts of VOCs are emitted from vegetation fires, including several reactive compounds, the majority belonging to the isoprenoid family, which rapidly disappear in the plume to yield pollutants such as s...