ArticleAnnals of botany2024
Fire-modulated fluctuations in nutrient availability stimulate biome-scale floristic turnover in time, and elevated species richness, in low-nutrient fynbos heathland.
Article in Annals of botany, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Diverging sex ratios in dioecious Proteaceae are exacerbated by anthropogenic disruptions to the fire cycle.Annals of botany · 2026Article
- South African Myxococcota: an untapped resource for microbial ecolo gy and biotechnology.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2025Review
- A unifying principle for multispecies coexistence under resource fluctuations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsIn many systems, postfire vegetation recovery is characterized by temporal changes in plant species composition and richness. We attribute this to changes in resource availability with time since fire, with the magnitude of species turnover determined by the degree of resource limitation. Here, we test the hypothesis that postfire species turnover in South African fynbos heathland is powered by fire-modulated changes in nutrient availability, with the magnitude of turnover in nutrient-constrained fynbos being greater than in fertile renosterveld shrubland. We also test the hypothesis that floristic overlaps between fynbos and renosterveld are attributable to nutritional augmentation of fynbos soils immediately after fire.
methodsWe use vegetation survey data from two sites on the Cape Peninsula to compare changes in species richness and composition with time since fire. KEY
resultsFynbos communities display a clear decline in species richness with time since fire, whereas no such decline is apparent in renosterveld. In fynbos, declining species richness is associated with declines in the richness of plant families having high foliar concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and possessing attributes that are nutritionally costly. In contrast, families that dominate late-succession fynbos possess adaptations for the acquisition and retention of sparse nutrients. At the family level, recently burnt fynbos is compositionally more similar to renosterveld than is mature fynbos.
conclusionsOur data suggest that nutritionally driven species turnover contributes significantly to fynbos community richness. We propose that the extremely low baseline fertility of fynbos soils serves to lengthen the nutritional resource axis along which species can differentiate and coexist, thereby providing the opportunity for low-nutrient extremophiles to coexist spatially with species adapted to more fertile soil. This mechanism has the potential to operate in any resource-constrained system in which episodic disturbance affects resource availability.
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