Productivity modifies the effects of fire severity on understory diversity

High severity fire may promote or reduce plant understory diversity in forests. However, few empirical studies have tested long-standing theoretical predictions that productivity may help to explain observed variation in post-fire plant diversity. Support for the influence of productivity on disturbance-diversity relationships is found predominantly in experimental grasslands, while tests over large areas with natural disturbance and productivity gradients are few and have yielded inconsistent results. Here, we measured the response of post-fire understory plant diversity to natural gradients of fire severity and productivity in a large-scale observational study in California's subalpine forests. We found that plant species richness increased with increasing fire severity and that this trend was stronger at high productivity. We used plant traits to investigate whether release from competition might contribute to increasing diversity and found that short-lived and far-dispersing species benefited more from high severity fire than their long-lived and near-dispersing counterparts. For far-dispersing species only, the benefit from high severity fire was stronger in high productivity plots where unburned species richness was lowest. Our results support theoretical connections between fire severity, productivity and plant communities that are key to predicting the consequences of increasing fire severity and frequency on diversity in the coming decades.