DOI: 10.5061/dryad.3bk3j9khn
title: Resprouting grasses are associated with less frequent fire than seeders

description: Plant populations persist under recurrent fire via resprouting from
 surviving tissues (resprouters) or seedling recruitment (seeders). Woody
 species are inherently slow-maturing, meaning that seeders are confined to
 infrequent fire regimes. However, for grasses, which mature faster, the
 relationships between persistence strategy and fire regime remains
 unknown. Globally, we analysed associations between fire regimes
 experienced by hundreds of grass species and their persistence strategy,
 within a phylogenetic context. We also tested whether persistence
 strategies are associated with morphological and physiological traits.
 Resprouters were associated with less frequent fire than seeders. Whilst
 modal fire frequencies were similar (fire return interval of 4-6 years),
 seeders were restricted to regions with more frequent fire than
 resprouters, suggesting that greater competition with long-lived
 resprouters restricts seeder recruitment and survival when fire is rare.
 Resprouting was associated with lower leaf N, higher C/N ratios and the
 presence of below-ground buds, but was unrelated to photosynthetic
 pathway. Differences between the life histories of grasses and woody
 species lead to a contrasting prevalence of seeders and resprouters in
 relation to fire frequency. Rapid sexual maturation in grasses means that
 seeder distributions, relative to fire regime, are determined by
 competitive ability and recruitment, rather than time to reproductive
 maturity.
description: Description of files
 <strong>plant_traits.csv</strong>: species level
 values for plant traits. Columns: 
 Column name Description of data
 species Species
 latin binomial 
 resprouter Resprouting ability after fire
 (from literature review - see resprouting_ability file to see information
 sources used in this classification). 
 photosynthetic.pathway Photosynthetic
 pathway used 
 life.history Life history
 bud.position Where a
 species resprouts from. C=crown resprouter (caespitose species without
 rhizomes or stolons), R=rhizomatous species; S=stoloniferous
 species dim.1
 Dimension 1 values from a principal components analysis of leaf
 traits (specific leaf area, leaf N content, leaf C:N from Jardine et al 2020) dim.2 Dimension 2 values from a principal components analysis of leaf traits (specific leaf area, leaf N content, leaf C:N from Jardine et al 2020)   <strong>resprouting_ability.xlsx</strong>: Species-level data on the ability to resprout after fire, including the sources where data was collected from. Columns: Column name Description of data Species name Latin binomial Family 'Poaceae' for all Resprouter Resprouting ability after fire: yes/no Location Geographic area where study is based Synonyms   Citation code Shorthand of informations source (these correspond to the full citations given in the 2nd tab)   <strong>Poaceae.phylogeny.MCC.concise.tre</strong>: Phylogeny  <strong>fire_drought_data.csv</strong>: species level values for fire frequency, fire intensity and drought. Columns: Column name Description of data species Latin binomial median_FRI_years species median fire return interval (in years) prop_burnt proportion of records per species that occur in pixels that burnt at least once in during the MODIS dataset q95_FRP_MW 95th percentile of fire radiative power (in MW) mean_drought   <strong>Example script for DRYAD.R</strong>: An example R code to extract and clean occurrence data, extract fire characteristic data, and carry out the phylogenetic logistic regression