The ADAPT Project addresses a pressing global issue: the increasing severity and frequency of wildfires under climate change. Recent events such as the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires and recurrent fires in California demonstrate how rising global temperatures are intensifying fire activity, threatening biodiversity, human livelihoods, and ecosystem stability. Understanding how plants have evolved to persist in fire-prone environments is essential for assessing ecosystem resilience in the face of ongoing environmental change.
ADAPT investigates the deep evolutionary origins of fire-related traits in plants, focusing on one of the earliest proposed fire-adaptive traits, branch shedding in conifers, which first appeared over 280 million years ago. The project explores whether this and other fire-related traits evolved as direct responses to wildfire or as part of broader climatic and ecological shifts.
To address this question, ADAPT integrated three key research components:
1. Palaeoecological reconstruction of late Palaeozoic landscapes revealed that ancient ecosystems were more complex and variable than previously understood, transitioning from wetland forests to drier, mosaic environments that shaped early fire regimes.
2. Flammability experimentation on living conifers established a novel protocol for shoot-level testing and demonstrated that plant functional traits contribute to ignition and combustion behaviour, providing critical data for linking modern and ancient fire dynamics.
3. Palaeofire modelling combined fossil and experimental data to estimate fire behaviour under past atmospheric conditions, showing that both fire and climate acted as long-term selective pressures influencing the evolution of fire-related plant traits.
Together, these results represent the first integrated analysis of how shifting climate, vegetation, and fire regimes interacted to shape plant evolution through deep time. The project provides a framework for interpreting the persistence and function of fire-related traits in today’s ecosystems and for anticipating their responses to future climate-driven changes in wildfire activity.
By bridging fossil evidence, modern experimentation, and modelling, ADAPT enhances our understanding of the feedbacks between vegetation, climate, and fire, knowledge that is vital for informing global biodiversity and resilience strategies in a warming world.
