Biodiversity metrics
We calculated two response variables (relative species richness – alpha diversity; beta-diversity - pairwise dissimilarity) for each of the four analysed life forms, i.e., trees/shrubs, forbs, graminoids, and climbers. Relative species richness was calculated following Burivalova et al., (2014) as the total number of species in the burnt site divided by the total number of species in the unburnt site. Consequently, values of one represent situations where fire has no impact on species richness, values less than one represent situations where fire reduces species richness, and values greater than one represent situations where fire increases species richness.
Species turnover (beta diversity) was calculated as Sørensen pairwise dissimilarity index (Sørensen, 1948), which is widely used to measure the spatial turnover for presence/absence data in ecology and is independent of species richness (Koleff et al., 2003; Socolar et al., 2016). A value of 0 means the composition of two communities is identical, and a value of 1 means the two communities do not share any species in common.