Prescribed Fire Improves Grassland Habitat

Prescribed fire burning grasslands at Crow’s Nest Preserve

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

The beginning of March is unusually early for us to be doing prescribed fire, but the conditions have been ideal on some days (and too dry on others). Staff began last week with burning 18 acres of grasslands at Green Hills Preserve—our first time using fire there. You can see the two fields in the photo below, taken a week after the burn.

A prescribed burn is a controlled application of fire to a meadow under appropriate weather conditions and fuel and soil moisture.

This will confine the fire to predetermined areas and produce the intensity of heat and rate of spread required to accomplish our goals. The burns are conducted only if all necessary conditions are met.

Prescribed fire more closely mimics a natural process than mowing, an alternative we use when burning is not possible.

We started this week with a couple small burns at Crow’s Nest Preserve. We burned a small meadow with warm-season grasses and bottle gentians that have responded well to prescribed fire. Below, the meadow below the Chief’s Grove is freshly blackened. (The top photo shows the classic chevron shape of the prescribed fire where two flanks of fire are drawing together before going out.)