Conclusions
Our data compilation and analysis of tropical/sub-tropical plant community responses to fire generates important findings that inform knowledge of fire impacts and mitigation strategies and help shape future research agendas. Despite increasing awareness of changing tropical fire regimes, limited studies address plant community responses to key fire features, and long-term longitudinal studies that can quantify recovery times are particularly scarce. More focused research is needed to assess how recovery rates are influenced by landscape composition and configuration. We uncover considerable heterogeneity across plant life forms in their responses to fire metrics and encourage researchers to consider this when reporting fire impact studies. Our research makes four important contributions. First, we uncover evidence that fire impacts on species richness and recovery of community composition can vary with protection status, with protected areas appearing to be able to buffer some plant communities from fire-induced changes. Second, we find that prescribed and non-prescribed burns can vary in their impacts on plant communities, and this should be considered when designing prescribed burning strategies to reduce the risk of larger, more intense non-prescribed fires. Third, there were no differences in fire impacts between fire-adapted and fire-sensitive biomes regarding species richness and community composition of life forms, except in the forb’s community. Finally, and most importantly, we find major shifts in species composition of plant communities, which are often detectable ten years after a fire. Tropical/sub-tropical plant communities thus appear particularly vulnerable to compositional changes from the observed and projected future increases in fire frequency that reduce recovery time between fire events.