Fire-related cues and germination from the soil seed bank of senescent remnants of mallee vegetation on Eastern Kangaroo Island

Plant communities dominated by narrow-leaved mallee (Eucalyptus cneorifolia) are almost entirely confined to north-eastern Kangaroo Island, South Australia, an area which has been extensively cleared for agriculture. Consequently, surviving examples consist mostly of small remnants which are thought to be senescent due to the exclusion of fire. This senescence is associated with the loss of many native understory species. Prescribed burns have been suggested as a management tool to stimulate the restoration of native plants from the soil seed bank; however, no seed bank studies have previously been conducted on Kangaroo Island and the seed bank literature usually focuses on particular species rather than on plant communities. We conducted an experiment to investigate the effects of the fire-related cues heat and smoke on the germination of plants from the seed bank in soil sampled from 10 long-ungrazed narrow-leaved mallee sites on Kangaroo Island. Eighty trays of soil were monitored in a controlled glasshouse for five months after being subjected to heat and/or smoke treatments. The overall number of native, but not exotic, plant species germinating from the soil seed bank was significantly increased by all three fire-related treatments (heat, smoke and heat plus smoke) compared with the control (no fire-related treatment). Different plant life forms exhibited varying responses to heat and smoke treatments. The results of this study illustrate that the application of fire-related treatments to soil seed banks in controlled glasshouse conditions can stimulate the recruitment of native species, including several species of conservation concern. These findings also indicate the potential of using these treatments for the ex situ germination of fire dependent species for revegetation purposes and indicate aspects of prescribed burns that may be important for restoring different components of native vegetation.