Wildfire begets fire adaptation
Thomas Brussel, geography doctoral candidate, and collaborators developed a new method
for understanding how plant communities’ function in relation to wildfires over the
past 13,000 years. The researchers combined pollen, charcoal and functional trait
data with their new method to assess a plant community’s functional trait variation
to understand ecosystems in a new way. They found that as wildfires burned more frequently,
the forest shifted from having more fire-sensitive traits, such as short heights,
to more fire-adapted traits, such as taller heights. Read more.