• Plant populations persist under recurrent fire via resprouting from surviving tissues (resprouters) or seedling recruitment (seeders). Woody species are inherently slow-maturing, meaning that seeders are confined to infrequent fire regimes. However, for grasses, which mature faster, the relationships between persistence strategy and fire regime remains unknown.
• Globally, we analysed associations between fire regimes experienced by hundreds of grass species and their persistence strategy, within a phylogenetic context. We also tested whether persistence strategies are associated with morphological and physiological traits.
• Resprouters were associated with less frequent fire than seeders. Whilst modal fire frequencies were similar (fire return interval of 4-6 years), seeders were restricted to regions with more frequent fire than resprouters, suggesting that greater competition with long-lived resprouters restricts seeder recruitment and survival when fire is rare. Resprouting was associated with lower leaf N, higher C/N ratios and the presence of below-ground buds, but was unrelated to photosynthetic pathway.
• Differences between the life histories of grasses and woody species lead to a contrasting prevalence of seeders and resprouters in relation to fire frequency. Rapid sexual maturation in grasses means that seeder distributions, relative to fire regime, are determined by competitive ability and recruitment, rather than time to reproductive maturity.

Description of files

plant_traits.csv: species level values for plant traits. Columns:

resprouting_ability.xlsx: Species-level data on the ability to resprout after fire, including the sources where data was collected from. Columns:

Poaceae.phylogeny.MCC.concise.tre: Phylogeny 

fire_drought_data.csv: species level values for fire frequency, fire intensity and drought. Columns:

Example script for DRYAD.R: An example R code to extract and clean occurrence data, extract fire characteristic data, and carry out the phylogenetic logistic regression