Resistance and resilience to changing climate and fire regime depend on plant functional traits

Changing disturbance-climate interactions will drive shifts in plant communities: these effects are not adequately quantified by environmental niche models used to predict future species distributions. We quantified the effects of more frequent fire and lower rainfall - as projected to occur under a warming and drying climate - on population responses of shrub species in biodiverse Mediterranean-climate type shrublands near Eneabba, southwestern Australia. Using experimental fires, we measured the density of all shrub species for four dominant plant functional groups (resprouter/non-sprouter x serotinous/soil seed bank) before and after fire in 33 shrubland sites, covering four post-fire rainfall years and fire intervals from 3 – 24 years. Generalized linear mixed effects models were used to test our a priori hypotheses of rainfall, fire interval, and plant functional type effects on post-fire survival and recruitment. At shortened fire intervals, species solely dependent on seedling re...