Fire drives the reproductive responses of herbaceous plants in a Neotropical swamp Glein M. Arau ´jo • Alice F. Amaral • Emilio M. Bruna • Heraldo L. Vasconcelos Received: 9 August 2013 / Accepted: 7 October 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract Palm swamps (veredas) are unique and diverse plant communities associated with the head- waters of streams in central Brazil, and they are frequently subjected to fires. We evaluated the effect of fire and the role of different fire-related cues on inducing reproduction by palm swamp vegetation. We compared the responses of species in burned plots, in plots in which the aboveground vegetation was clipped and then removed, and in unburned and unclipped control plots. Both the number of reproductive species and the total number of flowers/fruits produced by all species monthly were significantly greater in the burned than in the clipped and control plots, and greater in the clipped than in the control plots. For 34 of the 48 individual species analyzed the number of flowers/fruits produced per m 2 /month was greater in the burned than in the control plots, whereas the clipping treatment significantly increased the repro- ductive rate of only six species. This indicates that increased light availability was not the only factor inducing plant reproduction. Most likely, plant repro- duction was also stimulated by the availability of soil nutrients whose concentrations increased significantly after burning. Although our results indicate that most plant species that occur in palm swamps are fire- recruiters, care must be taken in using fire as manage- ment tool, especially as the frequency of human-induced fires in palm swamps have increased dramatically in recent years. Keywords Cerrado Á Fire Á Savannas Á Hydrophilic flora Á Induced reproduction Á Phenology Introduction Fire can stimulate the flowering of a wide variety of plant taxa via cues that are either direct (e.g., heat, smoke, ethylene) or indirect (e.g., enhanced nutrient availability) (Coutinho 1990; Mistry 1998; Main and Barry 2002; Miranda et al. 2009; Lamont and Downes 2011). However, other physical factors may also affect whether or not plants flower or fruit. These include the clearing of aboveground biomass and surface litter (Lamont and Downes 2011), which may be Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11258-013-0268-9) contains supple- mentary material, which is available to authorized users. G. M. Arau ´jo Á H. L. Vasconcelos (&) Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal de Uberla ˆndia, C.P. 593, Uberla ˆndia, MG 38400-902, Brazil e-mail: heraldo@umuarama.ufu.br A. F. Amaral Universidade Federal de Tocantins, Av Universita ´ria s/n, Arraias, TO 77330-000, Brazil E. M. Bruna Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, P.O. Box 110430, Gainesville, FL 32611-0430, USA 123 Plant Ecol DOI 10.1007/s11258-013-0268-9