ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Intensifying postfire weather and biological invasion drive species loss in a Mediterranean-type biodiversity hotspot.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 90 citations in OpenAlex.
- The biodiversity survey of the Cape (BioSCape), integrating remote sensing with biodiversity science.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- Fire-modulated fluctuations in nutrient availability stimulate biome-scale floristic turnover in time, and elevated species richness, in low-nutrient fynbos heathland.Annals of botany · 2024Article
- Seasonal Movement Patterns of Urban Domestic Cats Living on the Edge in an African City.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Biome boundary maintained by intense belowground resource competition in world's thinnest-rooted plant community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Climate change winners and losers: The effects of climate change on five palm species in the Southeastern United States.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Invasive alien plant species: Their impact on environment, ecosystem services and human health.Ecological indicators · 2020Review
- Plant community diversity will decline more than increase under climatic warming.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Climate and plant community diversity in space and time.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Review
- The Global Museum: natural history collections and the future of evolutionary science and public education.PeerJ · 2020Article
- Climate drives loss of phylogenetic diversity in a grassland community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Monitoring the critically endangered Clanwilliam cedar with freely available Google Earth imagery.PeerJ · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 7 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prolonged periods of extreme heat or drought in the first year after fire affect the resilience and diversity of fire-dependent ecosystems by inhibiting seed germination or increasing mortality of seedlings and resprouting individuals. This interaction between weather and fire is of growing concern as climate changes, particularly in systems subject to stand-replacing crown fires, such as most Mediterranean-type ecosystems. We examined the longest running set of permanent vegetation plots in the Fynbos of South Africa (44 y), finding a significant decline in the diversity of plots driven by increasingly severe postfire summer weather events (number of consecutive days with high temperatures and no rain) and legacy effects of historical woody alien plant densities 30 y after clearing. Species that resprout after fire and/or have graminoid or herb growth forms were particularly affected by postfire weather, whereas all species were sensitive to invasive plants. Observed differences in the response of functional types to extreme postfire weather could drive major shifts in ecosystem structure and function such as altered fire behavior, hydrology, and carbon storage. An estimated 0.5 °C increase in maximum temperature tolerance of the species sets unique to each survey further suggests selection for species adapted to hotter conditions. Taken together, our results show climate change impacts on biodiversity in the hyperdiverse Cape Floristic Region and demonstrate an important interaction between extreme weather and disturbance by fire that may make flammable ecosystems particularly sensitive to climate change.
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