Understanding novel fire regimes using plant trait‐based approaches: An introduction

Fire is a natural disturbance in many biomes, but altered fire regimes are a global change threat impacting both fire-sensitive and fire-dependent ecosystems. Novel fire regimes now affect many ecosystems, and as the main fuels of wildfires, plants feature prominently in our understanding of fire as part of a changing world. This issue of the American Journal of Botany showcases studies using trait-based approaches to understand fire–plant dynamics from evolutionary, ecological, organismal, physiological, fire management, and conservation perspectives. Plant traits—in the broad sense, including functional, species, response and effect, and emergent traits—can provide mechanistic insights across biological scales, improving our understandings of many botanical aspects of novel fire regimes, including evolutionary syndromes conferring fire tolerance to plants (Triplett and David, 2024; Bombo et al., 2025; Cruz et al., 2025; Keeley and Pausas, 2025; Schwilk et al., 2025; Turck et al., 2025), plant responses to altered frequency and intensity of fires (heathlands: Simpson et al., 2025), the role of plant flammability (Mahmud et al., 2025; Murray et al., 2025; Pacheco et al., 2025; Sultana et al., 2025), plant community assembly under novel fire regimes (Raubenheimer et al., 2025; Sano et al., 2025), restoration in the context of fire, fire as a restoration tool, and several others. Given that altered fire regimes are global phenomena, the special issue strove for a global perspective. In particular, fire is emerging as a novel threat in many regions with historically low fire impact, making these systems promising sites for novel fire regime studies, such as the Pacific Islands (Barton et al., 2025), tropical wet forests (rainforest: Burton et al., 2025; Pacuk et al., 2025), the Chilean matorral (Ocampo-Zuleta et al., 2025), high-elevation and cloud forests, alpine and polar forests, grasslands (Charton et al., 2025; Nerlekar et al., 2025), savannas (Zanzarini et al., 2025), and bogs. AJB and we, the special issue editors, are grateful to the authors and reviewers who brought this important special issue to fruition, and to all the scientists who are working to understand fire-plant dynamics.