Plant community responses to wildfire may be contingent upon historical disturbance regimes

Ecological disturbance is a major driver of ecosystem structure and evolutionary selection, and theory predicts that disturbance frequency and / or intensity should determine its effects on communities. However, adaptations of species pools to different historical disturbance regimes are rarely considered in the search for generalizable community responses to disturbance. To explore how disturbance severity affects plant diversity patterns, we review studies of understory plant community responses to wildfire in conifer forests of western North America across a gradient of departure from historical fire regimes. We find that post-fire plant species richness may generally be maximized at disturbance severities that match the predominant historical disturbance regime in a given ecosystem. Studies that examined multiple spatial scales indicate that plant community responses to fire are likely to be scale-dependent, suggesting that post-disturbance monitoring should consider community responses at multiple scales. Our review highlights that considering adaptations to historical disturbance regimes may improve the ability to predict disturbance effects on communities. We discuss future research needs; quantitative studies that compare community responses to fire at multiple scales across different historical fire regimes would be particularly useful. Ultimately, considering disturbance as a multivariate problem is likely to lead to greater inference than traditional bivariate approaches.