Resilience of a tropical montane pine forest to fire and severe droughts

1. Higher temperatures, declining precipitation, changing cloud cover, and increased wildfires threaten tropical montane pine forests by overriding the environmental heterogeneity that typically buffers these systems from catastrophic fires. Severe fires threaten to overwhelm forest resilience and tip this biome into alternate vegetation states. 2. This study focused on long-term dynamics of montane Pinus occidentalis forests in the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic, after a ~1000 km2 fire in 2005, the largest since 1965. We used long-term records to investigate climate before and after the fire and a 19-year dataset of pre- and post-fire vegetation change from a network of 55 permanent plots (20 small 0.05 ha plots and 35 large 0.1 ha plots) established in 1999 to model overstorey and understorey vegetation dynamics. 3. The 2005 fire was synchronized with the most extreme drought in the region in over 60 years. The fire burned from < 1600 to > 3000 m a.s.l. in elevation acr...