Literature search
A systematic literature search was conducted following the PRISMA
guidelines (Liberati et al., 2009; Moher et al., 2009) and completed in
March 2023. Three searches were carried out using ‘Web of Science’, with
the search terms: i) fire* AND “species richness” AND plant*; ii)
burn* AND “species richness” AND plant*; and iii) fire*AND “species
richness” AND tree*. Our objective was to retain papers that were
empirical field-based studies, conducted in the tropics or sub-tropics,
i.e., 30o north to 30o south
(Corlett, 2013), and that provided complete species lists for control
(unburnt or sites sampled before a fire) and treatment sites (those with
fires). We only selected studies with equal sampling effort in control
and treatment sites, as such biases in study design can impact
conclusions regarding fire impacts on biodiversity (Kelly et al., 2017).
Data collection process took place in five stages (Table 1). After
collecting the papers from the initial search, titles were scanned to
identify papers that could be used to understand the impacts of fire on
plant diversity in tropical and sub-tropical locations. Duplicate papers
were removed, and abstracts were then scanned. Papers were only accepted
if the study met our criteria of being an empirical field-based study
located in the tropics or sub-tropics. We then read each paper in full
and removed those for which sampling effort was uneven across control
(unburnt) and treatment (burnt) sites or did not provide a complete
species list for each type of site. A list of retained papers is given
at Appendix 1 .
Table 1: The selection stages, procedure, and total no. of
papers obtained in the literature search.