Adaptive plant traits under anthropogenic burning regimes: A database for UK heath and mire plant species.

ABSTRACT:

Premise

Humans have used fire to manage landscapes for millennia, but this use of fire is declining in many ecosystems. Understanding how plants respond to these changes is key to predicting ecosystem resilience and impacts on services such as biodiversity and carbon sequestration. However, many ecosystems lack data on plant fire responses. A solution is to infer these responses through studying functional traits that offer fitness benefits under fire by enabling species to resist fire, or persist through fire, by resprouting or recruitment from stored seed banks or dispersed seed. Studying these traits helps predict species performance under fire.

Methods

We used a trait-based approach to create a database of fire-relevant traits and fire responses for vascular and nonvascu

SUBMITTER: Simpson KJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12572691 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature