| Abstract |
Plants are known to respond to fire. Shortly after a fire event plants are usually visited by large herbivores, thus the attractiveness of plants on a newly burned area seems to be higher in terms of food quality. Therefore, the qualitative response of plant to a fire event is interesting for the development of different management plans, e.g. for farming or nature conservation, as the occurrence of fire is usually related to the subsequent utilization of (large) herbivores. As plant quality is tightly related to nutrient availability in the soil, we assumed a similar post-burning response of grasses and trees. However, we found differences in the chemical response of different plant functional traits. Response pattern for trees were more consistent as for grasses. Surprisingly, compared to grasses the overall plant quality for trees was higher on burned sites compared to the control site. Here, quality means higher concentration in nitrogen, soluble cell compounds in tree leaves of the burned area compared to tree leaves of the control site. The response was more or less related to the plant functional trait “tree”. |
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