Despite the numerous values of riparian areas and the recognition of fire as a critical natural disturbance, few studies have investigated the behavior, properties, and influence of natural fire in riparian areas of the western USA. Riparian areas frequently differ from adjacent uplands in vegetative composition and structure, geomorphology, hydrology, microclimate, and fuel characteristics. Th...

Fires in the tallgrass prairie are frequent and significantly alter nutrient cycling processes. We evaluated the short-term changes in plant production and microbial activity due to fire and the long-term consequences of annual burning on soil organic matter (SOM), plant production, and nutrient cycling using a combination of field, laboratory, and modeling studies. In the short-term, fire in t...

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) depend on the presence of host plants (Asclepias spp.) within their breeding range for reproduction. In the southern Great Plains, Asclepias viridis is a perennial that flowers in May and June, and starts to senesce by August. It is locally abundant and readily used by monarchs as a host plant. We evaluated the effects of summer prescribed fire on A. virid...

Long-term ecological studies are critical for providing key insights in ecology, environmental change, natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. However, island fire ecology is poorly understood. No previous studies are available that analyze vegetative changes in burned and unburned dry forest remnants on Wa'ahila Ridge, Hawai'i. This study investigates vegetation succession f...

The strong association observed between fire regimes and variation in plant adaptations to fire suggests a rapid response to fire as an agent of selection. It also suggests that fire-related traits are heritable, a precondition for evolutionary change. One example is serotiny, the accumulation of seeds in unopened fruits or cones until the next fire, an important strategy for plant population p...

The widespread attention that has been devoted to wildfires by the public, as well as by state and federal governments, over the last several years in the United States has created a demand for fuel reduction activities aimed at alleviating wildfire hazard. While the appropriateness of these fuel reduction activities has been discussed in detail in previous studies, only a few studies have expe...

Induced defense is a common plant strategy in response to herbivory. Although abiotic damage, such as physical wounding, pruning, and heating, can induce plant defense, the effect of such damage by large-scale abiotic disturbances on induced defenses has not been explored and could have important consequences for plant survival facing future biotic disturbances. Historically, low-severity wildf...

Fire behavior of plant mixtures includes a complex set of processes for which the interactive contributions of its drivers, such as plant identity and moisture, have not yet been unraveled fully. Plant flammability parameters of species mixtures can show substantial deviations of fire properties from those expected based on the component species when burnt alone; that is, there are nonadditive ...