Journal article
From plant traits to fire behavior: scaling issues in flammability studies
- Abstract:
- Despite fire being one of the oldest and most important ecological disturbance processes on Earth, many aspects of fire-vegetation feedbacks are poorly understood, limiting their accurate representation in predictive models. Translating plant flammability traits to fire behavior and fire effects on ecosystems has proven a challenge with different disciplines approaching the problem at widely different scales. One approach has been a top-down assessment of ecosystem-level effects of vegetation structural characteristics and plant physiology on fuel properties such as fuel moisture. This approach has had some success, but is often forced to collapse species-specific variation into a small number of functional types and, as a practical necessity, usually focuses on highly plastic traits (e.g., moisture content) that can be modeled across an ecosystem without the need to characterize species-specific characteristics. The other approach grew out of trait-centric comparative ecology and focused on how traits might influence individual plant flammability. However, the degree to which such lab-based flammability trials reflect real species-specific differences maintained during wildland fires has been questioned. We review the history of these approaches, discuss where each has succeeded, and identify areas of research aimed at closing the apparent gap in scale.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Accepted manuscript, pdf, 2.1MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1002/ajb2.70040
Authors
+ Natural Environment Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/02b5d8509
- Grant:
- NE/W00058X/1
- Publisher:
- Wiley
- Journal:
- American Journal of Botany More from this journal
- Volume:
- 112
- Issue:
- 10
- Article number:
- e70040
- Place of publication:
- United States
- Publication date:
- 2025-05-16
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-02-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1537-2197
- ISSN:
-
0002-9122
- Pmid:
-
40378152
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2127288
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2127288
- Deposit date:
-
2025-09-22
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Botanical Society of America
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 Botanical Society of America. This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.
- Notes:
- The author accepted manuscript (AAM) of this paper has been made available under the University of Oxford's Open Access Publications Policy, and a CC BY public copyright licence has been applied.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record