The severity of fire impacts on fire-prone vegetation is often spatially heterogeneous, and
may lead to small-scale patchiness in the structure of plant populations by affecting mortality,
topkill, and reproduction. This patchiness, however, is not usually taken into account in fire
ecology studies. We show that a dry-season fire may result in small-scale patchiness in the
population structure of the common shrub Miconia albicans, mostly by differential topkill and
resprouting. We related fire severity to population structure parameters of the study species …