How seeds help us learn about fire in Australian landscapes

Ella Plumanns Pouton, Luke Kelly and team have a new paper on the timing of fires and plant species occurrence in the soil seedbank, in Journal of Applied Ecology.

Ella led a team that sampled the soil seedbank across 57 sites that represent a range of fire frequencies (1–9 fires in 81 years) and time since fire (1–81 years).

And through a 15-month germination experiment, identified 39,701 germinates from 245 plant species.

Using nonlinear models, the team quantified the responses of 75 species’ soil seedbanks to fire history and compared these to above-ground responses.

The study shows that fire frequency influences the probability of species occurrence in the soil seedbank. Frequent fire depletes seed availability of species that depend on long-lived soil seedbanks for persistence. Yet, other species, including perennials with short-lived seed storage, appear to be resilient to the frequency of fires experienced to date.

Overall, this indicates that fire management should aim to generate variation in fire frequencies within the landscape, including areas of low fire frequency, tailored to maintain rich plant diversity within the soil seedbank.

You can read more about the work in The Conversation and email Ella for more details.