Effects of fire on plants and animals: responses to fire
The simple notion that fires are bad for biodiversity is frequently not true; plant and animal species have a wide range of ways to deal with fire. Responses to fire can be assessed at several different levels: individual, population and community level.
Adaptations
Although the term fire ‘adaptations’ is often used to describe survival mechanisms of plants and animals, the situation is not quite as straight forward as this. Characters, such as re-sprouting ability and bark thickness are not necessarily due to the selection pressure of fire — there could be a number of other reasons why those characters developed. It is therefore perhaps more useful to think of these as characters that enable fire survival, rather than adaptations to fire.
