Fig. 1

a Conceptual diagram of fire regime characteristics and state changes for three example biomes. Fire regime is defined in terms of spatial (e.g., extent, type, patchiness), temporal (e.g., frequency, interval, seasonality), and physical (e.g., intensity, severity) fire characteristics. The size of flame in the figure represents fire extent, and the vertical placement of the flame represents fire type (e.g., surface vs. crown). The green and brown bands represent above- and below-ground biomass, respectively. The vertical black dashed lines represent fire regime state change. The gray wedges represent fire seasonality before fire regime change: W: winter, Sp: Spring, S: summer and F: fall/autumn. Red dashed lines inside wedges represent new fire regime seasonality after state change b The location of the fire regions used in this study (Olson 2001) with the number of respondents per fire region