Brief description
Disturbances are important ecosystem processes affecting patterns of species diversity (including species richness, diversity and evenness) and community composition. Determining appropriate disturbance regimes for particular ecosystems is thus an important issue for natural resource management. There have been few studies of the response of plant species composition and diversity to fire in ‘fire-sensitive’ Mediterranean-climate woodlands, where the dominant overstorey trees are typically killed by fire, resulting in dense post-fire recruitment. The Great Western Woodlands (GWW) region of south-western Australia supports the world’s largest remaining area of Mediterranean-climate woodland, which in mosaic with mallee, shrublands and salt lakes cover an area of 160 000 km2. Eucalyptus woodlands in this region are typically fire-sensitive, and fire return intervals recorded over recent decades have been much shorter than the long-term average. This has lead to considerable conservation concern regarding the loss of mature woodlands, and has highlighted a need to better understand how plant species composition and diversity changes with time since fire. We measured changes in diversity indices and floristic composition in Eucalyptus salubris woodlands with increasing time since fire at 72 50 x 50 m plots using a space-for-time approach. To estimate stand ages for this study we used satellite imagery, growth ring counts and relationships between growth ring counts and plant size, resulting in an estimated time since fire range sampled of 3 to 370 years.Data time period: 2010-07-01 to 2011-12-01
text: The western half of the Great Western Woodlands, south-western Western Australia. Plots were established in the vicinities of Karroun Hill (30o14′S, 118o30′E); Yellowdine (31o17′S, 119o39′E) and Parker Range (31o47′S, 119o37′E).
Subjects
Environmental Sciences |
GWW |
Great Western Woodlands |
Mediterranean-type ecosystem |
Soil Sciences |
ecological fire management |
fire interval |
gwwl |
obligate seeder |
space-for-time |
succession |
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Identifiers
- Local : lloyd.276
