Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Wildlife Restoration Program

Fires can be very healthy for habitats

If you’re just getting started in prescribed burning, it’s a very valuable tool. It’s something that was one a way of maintaining the environments that we had.

David Synatzske is the manager of the Chaparral Wildlife Management Area. He says there are two main types of burns.

Basically, there are restoration fires where you are trying to restore habitats; where you’re trying to get back to what habitats were at one time. Then you have maintenance fires, fires that maintain the existing habitat.

Those fires are used to accomplished different goals.

People burn for different reasons. Some people burn to open country up, to control brush encroachment. Other goals might be to simply create a change in under story, to create more grass or to create more forbs.

There are different ways of conducting burns.

If you have a fairly open type of habitat and you only want to control the undergrowth, you may burn it with a backfire as opposed to a head fire.

The season the burn is conducted also has a dramatic impact on the results. More on that, tomorrow.

That’s our show…we had research and writing help from Kate Lipinski… providing funding for the operations and management of the Chaparral WMA.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Prescribed Burns, Part 1 of 2 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Conservation, Education, Podcasts, Regulations, SFWR, Shows, WMAs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.