Prairie Fires

The New York Times has a story today on prairie fires:

The Texas Panhandle was ablaze last week, with three large wildfires consuming more than 800,000 acres of rangeland. Wet weather at week's end helped firefighters get the major fires under control, but the damage had been done: at least 11 people dead, an estimated 10,000 cattle and horses lost, homes and other property destroyed.

For the land itself, though, the fires were business as usual. The Great Plains have lived by fire for thousands of years.

"One of the important things to understand about prairie fires is they're just a natural part of the ecosystem," said James Stubbendieck, a professor of grassland ecology at the University of Nebraska. Among other things, he said, fires help control mesquite and other woody vegetation that compete for space and water with the grasses that livestock graze upon.

The problem is not so much that there are fires, but that the recent blazes were large and out of control, driven by winds gusting above 40 miles an hour. Ranchers often use smaller controlled fires as a range management tool, said Charles A. Taylor, a professor of rangeland ecology at Texas A&M's Agricultural Research Station in Sonora.

Prescribed fires are beneficial. Grass is the main fuel, he said, but brush is burned as well. "If you're not doing something to manage that brush, it's going to dominate the grass production and reduce biodiversity and the quality of wildlife habitat."

Prescribed burning was practiced by Native Americans long before white people arrived. "They were magnificent users of fire on the Plains," Mr. Stubbendieck said. They discovered that bison would graze on sites that had been burned the previous year, he said, "because there was nothing but new green luscious growth."