Journal article
Do multiple fires interact to affect vegetation structure in temperate eucalypt forests?
A Haslem, SWJ Leonard, MJ Bruce, F Christie, GJ Holland, LT Kelly, J MacHunter, AF Bennett, MF Clarke, A York
Ecological Applications | WILEY | Published : 2016
DOI: 10.1002/eap.1399
Abstract
Fire plays an important role in structuring vegetation in fire-prone regions worldwide. Progress has been made towards documenting the effects of individual fire events and fire regimes on vegetation structure; less is known of how different fire history attributes (e.g., time since fire, fire frequency) interact to affect vegetation. Using the temperate eucalypt foothill forests of southeastern Australia as a case study system, we examine two hypotheses about such interactions: (1) post-fire vegetation succession (e.g., time-since-fire effects) is influenced by other fire regime attributes and (2) the severity of the most recent fire overrides the effect of preceding fires on vegetation str..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We appreciate the efforts of many people involved in the five research programs which contributed data to these analyses: the Faunal Refuges Project; the Otways Fire, Landscape Pattern and Biodiversity project; Otways HawkEye; the Fire Effects Study Areas; and Gippsland Retrospective and HawkEye. We thank other members of the Foothills Fire and Biota Project team for their contributions to this work: Julian Di Stefano, Richard Loyn, Kasey Stamation, and Libby Rumpff. Funding for this project has been received from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. We thank a reviewer for thoughtful comments that improved previous versions of this manuscript.