Data from: The diversity of post-fire regeneration strategies in the cerrado ground layer

1. Disentangling species strategies that confer resilience to natural
disturbances is key to conserving and restoring savanna ecosystems. Fire
is a recurrent disturbance in savannas, and savanna vegetation is highly
adapted to, and often dependent on fire. However, although the woody
component of tropical savannas is well studied, we still do not understand
how ground-layer plant communities respond to fire, limiting conservation
and management actions. 2. We investigated the effects of prescribed fire
on community structure and composition, and evaluated which traits are
involved in plant community regeneration after fire in the cerrado ground
layer. We assessed traits related to species persistence and colonization
capacity after fire, including resprouter type, underground structure,
fire-induced flowering, regeneration strategy and growth form. We searched
for functional groups related to response to fire, to shed light on the
main strategies of post-fire recovery among species in the ground layer.
3. Fire changed ground-layer community structure and composition in the
short term, leading to greater plant species richness, population
densities, and increasing bare soil, compared with unburned communities.
Eight months after fire, species abundance did not differ from
pre-disturbance values for 86% of the species, demonstrating the
resilience of this layer to fire. Only one ruderal species was
disadvantaged by fire and 13% of the species benefited. Rapid recovery of
soil cover by native vegetation in burned areas was driven by species with
high capacity to resprout and spread vegetatively. Recovery of the savanna
ground-layer community, as a whole, resulted from a combination of
different species traits. We summarized these traits into five large
groups, encompassing key strategies involved in ground layer regeneration
after fire. Synthesis: Fire dramatically changes the ground layer of
savanna vegetation in the short term, but the system is highly resilient,
quickly recovering the pre-fire state. Recovery involves different
strategies, which we categorized into five functional groups of plant
species: grasses, seeders, bloomers, undergrounders, and resprouters.
Knowledge of these diverse strategies should be used as a tool to assess
conservation and restoration status of fire-resilient ecosystems in the
cerrado.