The Table Mountain National Park is a 265-km2 conservation area embedded within a city of 3.5 million people. The highly diverse and unique vegetation of the park is both fire prone and fire adapted, and the use of fire forms an integral part of the ecological management of the park. Because fires are both necessary and dangerous, fire management is characterized by uncertainty and conflict. Th...

In tropical landscapes, vegetation patches with contrasting tree densities are distributed as mosaics. However, the locations of patches and densities of trees within them cannot be predicted by climate models alone. It has been proposed that plant-fire feedbacks drive functional thresholds at a landscape scale, thereby maintaining open (savanna) and closed (forest) communities as two distinct ...

Disturbance is a primary mechanism structuring ecological communities. However, human activity has the potential to alter the frequency and intensity of natural disturbance regimes, with subsequent effects on ecosystem processes. In Southern California, human development has led to increased fire frequency close to urban areas that can form a positive feedback with invasive plant spread. Unders...

The increasing rate of woody plant encroachment in grasslands or savannas remains a challenge to livestock farmers. The causes and control measures of woody plant encroachment are of common interest, especially where it negatively affects the objectives of an agricultural enterprise. The objectives of this study were to determine the effects of gut passage (goats, cattle), dung (nutrients), fir...

Of the 110 000 to 180 000 hectares per year on which prescribed burning has recently been conducted in Canada, 70 000 to 150 000 hectares per year (mostly in British Columbia) has been burned for vegetation management purposes. Such purposes include silviculture, control of plant parasites, promotion of desirable plant species, and conservation of natural ecosystems. The emphasis of prescribed ...

An intense debate exists on the effects of post-fire salvage logging on plant community regeneration, but scant data are available derived from experimental studies. We analyzed the effects of salvage logging on plant community regeneration in terms of species richness, diversity, cover, and composition by experimentally managing a burnt forest on a Mediterranean mountain (Sierra Nevada, S Spai...

Disturbance can both initiate and shape patterns of secondary succession by affecting processes of community assembly. Thus, understanding assembly rules is a key element of predicting ecological responses to changing disturbance regimes. We measured the composition and trait characteristics of plant communities early after widespread wildfires in Alaska to assess how variations in disturbance ...

Fire disturbance is a primary agent of change in the mediterranean-climate chaparral shrublands of southern California, USA. However, fire frequency has been steadily increasing in coastal regions due to ignitions at the growing wildland-urban interface. Although chaparral is resilient to a range of fire frequencies, successively short intervals between fires can threaten the persistence of som...

In Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs), fire disturbance influences the distribution of most plant communities, and altered fire regimes may be more important than climate factors in shaping future MTE vegetation dynamics. Models that simulate the high-frequency fire and post-fire response strategies characteristic of these regions will be important tools for evaluating potential landscape cha...

Fire is a major disturbance affecting ecosystems worldwide. Phylogenetic studies have shown that the evolution of seed persistence (fire resistance) is associated with fire frequency or severity. However, the existence of specific seed traits resulting from natural selection mediated by fire remains a key question in plant evolution. We evaluated the role of fire in the evolution of seed traits...