Scaling up flammability from individual leaves to fuel beds

Wildfires play an important role in vegetation composition and structure, nutrient fluxes, human health and wealth, and are interlinked with climate change. Plants have an influence on wildfire behaviour and predicting this feedback is a high research priority. For upscaling from leaf traits to wildfire behaviour we need to know if the same leaf traits are important for the flammability of (i) individual leaves, and (ii) multiple leaves packed in fuel beds. Based on a conceptual framework, we hypothesised that fuel packing properties, through airflow limitation, would overrule the effects of individual leaf morphology and chemistry. To test this hypothesis we compared the results of two experiments, respectively addressing individual leaf flammability and monospecific fuel bed flammability of 25 perennial species from eastern Australia. Across species, fuel bed packing ratio and bulk density scaled negatively with fire spread and positively with maximum temperature and burning time. Spe...