Figure 1.

Schematic showing general mechanism of the forage maturation hypothesis (FMH) and its extension to fire‐prone ecosystems. (A) Foraging constraints of daily cropping (solid line) and digestion (dashed for burned grassland, dotted line for not‐burned grassland) that results in (B) maximum daily nutrient intake at an intermediate forage biomass in recently burned and not recently burned grassland. This figure is modified from Hebblewhite et al. (2008) for a fire‐prone grassland with the dashed line indicating constraints in burned grassland and dotted line indicating constraints in not‐burned grassland in the second panel (B).