# Community Abundance of Resprouting in Woody Plants Reflects Fire Return Time, Intensity, and Type
## 2 Methods  
### Species Cover and Resprouting Information  
Information on species distributions in Australia and Europe was derived from sPlotOpen [20]. sPlotOpen provides information on the relative cover of individual species that is derived by normalising the cover of all species to 1 in each plot. We refer to this as the proportion of resprouters. We removed nested sub-plots within a larger plot in order to reduce over-sampling. The method by which species cover was recorded varied between plots in sPlotOpen. We only used plots where data were recorded for all species. Sampling methods were not always documented in Europe, but the sampling could be assumed to represent all species at undocumented sites, according to the sPlotOpen documentation; therefore, we included these plots in our sample. This yielded a combined dataset of 37,376 plots, with 8056 plots from Australia and 29,320 plots from Europe (Figure 1). Tree and shrub species were classified into resprouters and non-resprouters using information from plant trait databases, specifically TRY (version 6, Jena, Germany), BROT, and AusTraits [17; 18; 19]; publications [21]; and regional expert knowledge. We investigated resprouting in woody species because their ability to resprout after fire is particularly important for the carbon cycle. We assumed that a species was a resprouter if there was one record of it resprouting across all the data sources, even if other sources recorded it as not resprouting, because the trait is facultative and the specific fire history or climate characteristics of the sampling sites can therefore impact the observations. We did not distinguish between resprouting caused by different types of disturbances (e.g., by fire, drought, or herbivory) since we assumed that the ability to resprout is an inherited trait and the ability to resprout when severely damaged means that a species could also resprout after fire. We were able to classify 1570 woody species into resprouters or non-resprouters (Table S1), representing 65% of the woody species in Australia and 38% of the woody species in Europe (Table 1). Given the relatively high proportion of species for which no information was available about the ability to resprout (Table 1) and the potential observational bias towards recording resprouters over non-resprouters, we tested whether treating unclassified species as non-resprouters would affect the results. To do this, we calculated the proportion of resprouters in each plot in two ways: first where the proportion of resprouters was relative to the total cover of species with known responses (P\({}_{1}\) resprouter, Equation (1)) and second where the proportion of resprouters was relative to the total cover of all woody species (P\({}_{2}\) resprouter, Equation (2)):  
\[P_{1}(\textit{resprouter})=\frac{\textit{proportion of resprouters}}{\textit{ proportion of resprouters}+\textit{proportion of non-resprouters}} \tag{1}\]  
\[P_{2}(\textit{resprouter})=\frac{\textit{proportion of resprouters}}{\textit{ proportion of all woody species}} \tag{2}\]  
where the proportion was calculated as the sum of the relative cover data of all the species in each category in each plot. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline  & **Woody Species** & **R\({}^{+}\)** & **R\({}^{-}\)** & **R\({}^{7}\)** & **Percentage of** \\  & & & & **Known Species** \\ \hline Australia & 1890 & 969 (0) & 259 (1) & 661 & 65.03\% \\ Europe & 913 & 194 (83) & 32 (38) & 566 & 38.01\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Availability of information about the resprouting ability in woody species in Australia and Europe, showing the numbers of all woody species, resprouters (R\({}^{+}\)), non-resprouters (R\({}^{-}\)), and unclassified species (R\({}^{z}\)). The first figure in each category represents the number of species that show a response explicitly to fire, and the number in brackets shows the number that resprout in response to other factors.