Standardising taxonomy and life form classification
Species, genus, and family names were standardised according to The
Plant List, R packages Taxonstand version 2.4 (Cayuela et al.,
2012) and The World Flora, R package WorldFlora version 1.10
(Kindt, 2020). Species that differ in their life-history strategies,
especially plants, can exhibit divergent recovery responses to fire
(Maginel et al., 2019; Foster et al., 2018, Peterson & Reich, 2008).
Forbs and grasses, for example, often recover much quicker from fire
than tree species due to traits such as shorter generation times and
faster growth rates (Peterson & Reich, 2008; Machida et al., 2021).
There is also much inter-specific variation in plant species’ responses
to fire within life forms (Simpson et al., 2020; Trouvé et al., 2021).
Hence, we then classified each species to one of nine life forms:
tree/shrub, forb, climber, graminoid, fern, succulent, lichen, and moss
using eight datasets from the TRY database (Kattge et al., 2020);
Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) database in R using the
package BIEN, version 1.2.6 (Maitner, et al, 2017) and AusTraits,
a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora using the
package aurstraits in R (Falster et al, 2021). This allowed us to
classify 88 % of species; the remaining species were classified using
authenticated online sources or the life-form classification used in the
original study (Appendix 3, Table S2 ). Ferns, succulents,
lichens, and mosses were excluded from further analysis as they were
recorded in too few studies (fewer than five). A list of plant groups
and the number of i) studies that recorded them, ii) observations and
iii) species recorded is presented at Appendix 4, Table S3.