Doubled density and increased resilience: Consequences of seven consecutive annual dry-season fires to the unburned Cerrado grass layer

Tropical grasslands and savannas are dominated by C4 grasses, which are crucial for the biodiversity, structure, and functioning of these ecosystems. Yet, grasses have been neglected in vegetation science, leading to a superficial understanding of their responses to fire and of the mechanisms/traits associated with it. This hinders the effective management and conservation of the tropical open ecosystems, especially because recent anthropogenic fire regimes have raised concerns about the long-term effects of repeated dry-season burns. Therefore, we investigated how prolonged frequent fires affect the Cerrado grass layer by exploring community properties, functional guilds, population responses, and persistence mechanisms. We sampled all grass individuals within 120 permanent 1-m² plots before the first fire in 2015 (single fire recorded in the last 30 years) and again after seven annual mid-dry-season fires in 2022. We also collected data on traits relevant to species’ regeneration and ..., , # Doubled density and increased resilience: Consequences of seven consecutive annual dry-season fires to the unburned Cerrado grass layer

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.sj3tx96hn](10.5061/dryad.sj3tx96hn)

## Description of the data and file structure

To explore the effects of frequent fires in the grass layer, we selected three burned permanent grassland plots, each plot measuring 50 m x 20 m (0.1 ha) with 40 nested 1 m² subplots arranged in a grid. During the experiment, plots were burned every year from 2015 to 2021 (seven annual burns) during the mid-dry season (July or August). We counted and identified all grass individuals within each subplot (totaling 120 1 m² sampling units) in two surveys: before the first fire in 2015 and after the seven prescribed fires in 2022.

### Files and variables

#### File: Grasses_Dataset.csv

**Description:** Species' abundance data from each of the 120 1m² quadrats. 

##### Variables:

| Variable | Description ...,