Minimum fire frequency required to maintain biodiversity

The purpose is to make spatially explicit the minimum fire frequency required (lower thresholds in years) to maintain the biodiversity within untransformed examples of the 56 habitat types of the Little Karoo Use was made of the 56 habitat types contained in the vegetation map of the Little Karoo (Vlok et al. 2005).The biological needs in terms of the minimum fire frequencies require to retain maximum biodiversity were assigned for each habitat type. This resulted in a minimum fire frequency map for fire prone vegetation. Minimum fire frequencies were determined from published and unpublished monitoring data collected by CapeNature for each habitat type so as to determine the period that the slowest growing plant would require to mature (flower and produce sufficient seed to be able to regenerate) after a fire. The precautionary principle 100% of the plants needing to have flowered at least once or 50% at least three times was applied. Purpose: To make spatially explicit the minimum fire frequency required (lower thresholds in years) to maintain the biodiversity within untransformed examples of the 56 habitat types of the Little Karoo Methodology: Use was made of the 56 habitat types contained in the vegetation map of the Little Karoo (Vlok et al. 2005).The biological needs in terms of the minimum fire frequencies require to retain maximum biodiversity were assigned for each habitat type. This resulted in a minimum fire frequency map for fire prone vegetation. Minimum fire frequencies were determined from published and unpublished monitoring data collected by CapeNature for each habitat type so as to determine the period that the slowest growing plant would require to mature (flower and produce sufficient seed to be able to regenerate) after a fire. The precautionary principle 100% of the plants needing to have flowered at least once or 50% at least three times was applied.`