Conclusions
Our data compilation and analysis of tropical/sub-tropical plant
community responses to fire generates important findings that inform
knowledge of fire impacts and mitigation strategies and help shape
future research agendas. Despite increasing awareness of changing
tropical fire regimes, limited studies address plant community responses
to key fire features, and long-term longitudinal studies that can
quantify recovery times are particularly scarce. More focused research
is needed to assess how recovery rates are influenced by landscape
composition and configuration. We uncover considerable heterogeneity
across plant life forms in their responses to fire metrics and encourage
researchers to consider this when reporting fire impact studies. Our
research makes four important contributions. First, we uncover evidence
that fire impacts on species richness and recovery of community
composition can vary with protection status, with protected areas
appearing to be able to buffer some plant communities from fire-induced
changes. Second, we find that prescribed and non-prescribed burns can
vary in their impacts on plant communities, and this should be
considered when designing prescribed burning strategies to reduce the
risk of larger, more intense non-prescribed fires. Third, there were no
differences in fire impacts between fire-adapted and fire-sensitive
biomes regarding species richness and community composition of life
forms, except in the forb’s community. Finally, and most importantly, we
find major shifts in species composition of plant communities, which are
often detectable ten years after a fire. Tropical/sub-tropical plant
communities thus appear particularly vulnerable to compositional changes
from the observed and projected future increases in fire frequency that
reduce recovery time between fire events.