Post-fire resilience of restored coastal sage scrub and grassland communities

California coastal sage scrub (CSS) and native grassland systems are experiencing increased fire frequencies and extreme droughts due to climate change. These stressors, in addition to historical and ongoing disturbances, make native-dominated communities vulnerable to vegetation-type conversion to communities of non-native grassland. The challenge is to restore resilient native plant communities under these shifting conditions. Our study site, Bee Flat Canyon in the Santa Ana mountains, contains CSS, grasslands, and other plant communities degraded by historic agricultural and rangeland use. The area was restored by the Irvine Ranch Conservancy (IRC) over 10 years and burned shortly after project completion in the 2020 Silverado fire, presenting a unique opportunity to assess restoration resilience to fire. We studied how restored CSS communities recovered compared to unrestored degraded and intact areas post-fire, whether physiological traits influence post-fire cover of CSS species, ...