The burning bush

Abstract

book reviews ISSN 1948-6596 The burning bush Fire in Mediterranean Ecosystems: Ecology, Evolution and Management. Jon E. Keeley, William J. Bond. Ross A. Bradstock, Juli G. Pausas & Philip W. Rundel, 2011, Cambridge University Press. 522 pp. US$120 (hardback). ISBN: 978-1-139-15321-8. http://www.cambridge.org This book examines the role that fire plays in the five Mediterranean -type climate (MTC) regions of the world: California, central Chile, the Mediterranean Ba- sin, the south-western portions of the West- ern Cape Province of South Africa, and south -western Western Aus- tralia and portions of South Australia. These re- gions are characterized by winter rains and sum- mer drought and all have vast areas subject to high fire risk. Although the book is focused on the MTC regions, this text is of more general interest: the authors have succeeded in producing an in- sightful study of fire as an important determinant of ecosystem assembly and distribution. The au- thors use the MTC regions as a way to explore the interactions among vegetation, fire regime, cli- mate and geology. The sclerophyllous shrublands within the MTC regions (the Mediterranean-type vegetation) have received a great deal of attention from plant ecologists and evolutionary biologists and have served as some of the textbook examples of con- vergent evolution (e.g. Mooney 1977). Such work necessarily emphasized the broad similarities in climate across these five regions and often as- sumed that climate was the major cause of trait evolution and community composition. One strength of this book is the authors' use of the dissimilarities in environmental factors across these regions to tease apart the potential drivers of vegetation distribution. The authors consider the full range of plant communities found in these regions and also discuss the occurrence of Medi- terranean-type vegetation outside of areas strictly defined by a Mediterranean-type climate. This comparative perspective allows the authors to form some conclusions regarding when winter rain or summer drought are likely to be the impor- tant climate drivers of vegetation and allows them to examine the feedback interaction between fire and plant communities that can create sharp vegetation shifts within a climate region. The book is structured into three sections. The first section provides an overview of ecosys- tem convergence and indicates the major similari- ties and differences in both vegetation and fire across these regions. The chapters on fire regime and on fire-related plant traits in this section pro- vide an excellent, stand-alone, brief introduction to the ecology of plants and fire. The second section includes a chapter on each of the five MTC regions. Another strength of this book is in having the detailed chapters on each region explicitly compare similarities and differences. Some minor stylistic inconsistencies across chapters betray the multiple authored na- ture of the book (with authors based in four of the five MTC regions), but the chapters on individual regions are quite good and each covers the major vegetation types, the floristic composition and evolutionary history of the lineages that comprise the vegetation types, and detailed information on the historical and current role of fire. The final section covers trait evolution, community diversity and fire management. These chapters synthesize and build upon the informa- tion thus far presented. The authors make the strong argument for fire playing a key role in plant evolution and provide a good review of the accu- mulating experimental and comparative evidence for fire adaptations. A chapter on origins of Medi- terranean-type vegetation is especially useful be- cause it not only covers the paleoclimatic and pa- leobotanical information available, but also rigor- ously examines the assumptions inherent in many previous investigations of convergent evolution. As they do throughout the book, the authors here attempt to determine which elements of climate frontiers of biogeography 5.3, 2013 — © 2013 the authors; journal compilation © 2013 The International Biogeography Society