Fire in focus: Clarifying metrics and terminology for better ecological insight

Changing fire regimes are profoundly impacting ecosystems and society, requiring rapid advancement in fire‐related knowledge within and across disciplines. Given the influx of new disciplines into the fire field, a lack of transparent vocabulary for the application and interpretation of fire regime attributes and fire metrics impedes the capacity to scale ecological knowledge across ecosystems and continents. In this article, we acknowledge there are many ways to define or measure fire metrics, but demonstrate how precision and context are important for interpreting fire effects on biota. We illustrate the concept of linking fire metrics to specific relevant ecological mechanisms, using plants as an example. Synthesis and applications . This article demonstrates how considering the processes through which fire influences individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems acknowledges the connectivity between energetic, temporal, and spatial attributes of fire. This framework can help researchers and practitioners, particularly those new to the field, select fire metrics for research and management, interpret previous studies, and form a growing body of knowledge on fire‐related change.