Journal

Thirty-eight summers of fixed transects produce a strange kind of document. No single sheet says anything about fire. Read in sequence, against the district register, the same eleven grassland species describe a cycle about four years shorter than the one we have been quoting since 1970.

The argument turns on the state of the sheets rather than their presence: flowering material dominates the years immediately after burning and thins sharply by the fifth season. That signal survives even where the determinations have since been revised.