After the fires: plant responses and resilience under shifting fire regimes

The changing climate is reshaping our fire regimes, with fires of record-breaking extent, severity and frequency occurring around the world. The 2019–2020 Black Summer bushfires in Australia were a landmark event that revealed both the depth and the limits in our understanding of plant responses and resilience to shifting fire regimes. After the fires, researchers, government agencies, and land managers have worked to improve not only our understanding of plant responses and recovery, but also how fire regimes can help to both conserve and threaten species. In this Special Issue, we present a selection of the studies from this period of exciting research. These papers reflect our broadening understanding of the adaptive capacity of plants, along with their resilience and susceptibility, to changing fire regimes. Topics include the interactions between drought, fire and plant recovery, management opportunities to use fire as a conservation tool, and plant−fire relationships in ecosystems at either end of the fire-dependency gradient. This collection answers key questions about how plants may respond to changing fire regimes and proposes new avenues of research that will be essential to discover how to best protect plant species diversity into the future.