Can plants keep up with fire regimes through evolution?

Luke Kelly and colleagues explore the evolutionary consequences of changing fire regimes in their new paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

As fire patterns shift across the globe, plant populations need to keep up.

Luke and team show that variation in fire-related traits – such as resprouting, serotiny, and bark thickness – is widespread within plant species. This intraspecific variation provides fuel for evolutionary adaptation.

They introduce the concept of ‘trait-fire mismatch’: a type of phenotype-environment mismatch that occurs when plant traits no longer match contemporary fire regimes.

And they reason that this idea will help to open new ways of forecasting contemporary environmental changes, reducing mismatches, and conserving plants.

Check out the full paper.

Figure I. TRAIT-FIRE MISMATCHING. Illustrative examples of mismatch are shown where anthropogenic shifts in fire patterns have plausibly reduced plant fitness. The first example highlights a mismatch and accompanying shift in phenotype distribution that may have occurred thousands of years ago, and the other two illustrate more recent, human-driven changes in fire regimes and resulting selection pressures. In each case, different fire-related traits are likely under selection from fire regime changes. The evolutionary potential of fire-related traits, represented here by idealized phenotypes that are in transition and hypothesized to be under directional selection, is uncertain even for relatively well-studied species. Photo credits: Monterey pine – Luke Kelly; Alpine ash: Neil Blair, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; Lodgepole pine – Retama, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. From Kelly et al. 2025 Trends in Ecology and Evolution.