# Community Abundance of Resprouting in Woody Plants Reflects Fire Return Time, Intensity, and Type
## 1 Introduction  
Fire is a natural process, and the type, frequency, and intensity of fire vary along climate gradients [1, 2, 3]. Fire significantly impacts ecosystems because it consumes variable amounts of above-ground biomass and initiates succession [4]. However, plants in fire-prone ecosystems have evolved various mechanisms to resist or adapt to fire, including fire-stimulated regeneration, post-fire flowering, fire-induced seed release (serotiny), post-fire resprouting, and thick bark [5, 6, 7, 8]. The incidence of specific plant traits appears to be related to the frequency, intensity, and type of fire [9]. Specifically, in ecosystems with relatively infrequent fires, plants display resilience, and fire triggers enhanced recruitment through traits such as serotiny. In ecosystems with frequent but low-intensity or surface fires, species are likely to have traits that convey resistance, for example, thick bark, while in ecosystems with frequent and more intense fires, species are likely to have traits that convey resilience through rapid post-fire recovery, such as the ability to resprout.  
Post-fire resprouting is the ability to regenerate rapidly after fire from underground or above-ground meristems and is one of the most widely occurring fire-adaptive traits. Resprouting allows woody plants to persist after fire, maintaining fire-adapted communities and allowing very rapid ecosystem recovery [10]. This rapid recovery has a profound impact on the terrestrial carbon cycle by promoting significant carbon sequestration [11; 10; 12]. However, resprouting necessarily imposes a cost in terms of carbon allocation to meristems and regrowth, and it is important to understand the conditions in which the benefits conveyed by this behaviour are sufficient to outweigh these costs.  
Our current understanding of the relationships between fire regimes and resprouting is largely based on field observations at local scales. Developing a more quantitative understanding of these relationships is important to reveal the costs and trade-offs involved in this strategy. It would also provide a basis for incorporating rapid recovery through resprouting in fire-enabled vegetation models, which is currently largely ignored [12; 13]. This is, in turn, important to understand how ecosystems and the terrestrial carbon cycle will be affected by future changes in climate and fire [5; 6; 14; 15; 16]. The recent increase in data availability on both plant traits [17; 18; 19] and plot-based species cover [20] provides an opportunity to quantify the relationships between resprouting and fire properties.  
In this study, we examined the relationships between resprouting and fire properties using plot-level cover data from Australia and Europe from sPlotOpen [20]. These two regions differ in terms of their plant communities and provide a wide range of fire gradients and types. Furthermore, since there has been a considerable amount of research on fire adaptations in both regions, there have been more systematic attempts to record species-level fire-adaptive traits in regional plant trait databases such as BROT and AusTraits compared to other fire-prone regions such as North America. We first investigated the statistical relationship between fire frequency (expressed as the fire return time) and the incidence of resprouting in woody plants. We then investigated the relationships between the incidence of resprouting and other vegetation properties that influence the type of fire using generalised linear modelling (GLM). We used gross primary production (GPP) and grass cover as predictors, where GPP was considered as a measure of fuel abundance and hence fire intensity, while grass cover was considered as an indicator of the likelihood of ground fire and the speed of fire spread.