Fire as a global disturbance has acted across millions of years to shape terrestrial biomes. It has shaped the evolution of plants in concert with other disturbances and shape flora as we know it today. Increased global fire activity has posed the question to managers of how best to manipulate fire regimes to benefit people and biodiversity. Cultural burning is a form of prescribed burning undertaken by Indigenous people for a variety of reasons (often frequently at low intensities) promoting the regenerative aspects of fire. The frequency at which this is applied can be at odds with fire interval-based ‘thresholds’ developed by scientists, such as those generated based on plant life history traits for New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Using combinations of critical plant traits (plant functional types), predictions about future vegetation change are made possible.This study sought to explore whether the shortest fire intervals (minimum intervals) experienced in past observations o
Abstract
Premise of research. Worldwide, fire-sensitive shrubs have an important but underresearched life history, and in Australia they are threatened by anthropogenic changes to fire regimes and habitat loss. Typically, adults are killed by fire, but they can also senesce and die if interfire intervals are prolonged. Populations can regenerate from seed banks displaying fire-stimulated germination; however, populations are ephemeral, and true population sizes and connectedness are difficult to estimate. Persoonia hirsuta ssp. evoluta is an endangered, inconspicuous, fire-sensitive shrub with a soil-stored seed bank currently known only from a small number of locations within the fire-prone Sydney Basin. Although it appears highly fragmented and populations are typically small, we predicted that its seed bank would buffer populations against loss of genetic diversity and population differentiation. Methodology. We used microsatellite markers to assess genetic variation within three