Prickly pears are native plants that provide food and habitat for wildlife. However, they can reduce forage and increase livestock injury when there are too many of them. Plains prickly pear is adapted to fire, re-growing from seeds, roots, and pads, but fire can also kill plants.
Grazing immediately following a wildfire has been thought to be damaging to northern Great Plains grasslands, and delaying grazing is often recommended. This recommendation may be needlessly causing livestock producers extra work and loss of income, as these grasslands have been shown to be resilient to summer fire, grazing and drought.
Fire is common in the western Great Plains, but much less well studied than in eastern prairies. Wildfires most commonly occur in July and August in these semi-arid rangelands covered with cool-season grasses, but the impact of summer fires has not been well researched.
As land has been converging to crops, fire has been suppressed, coyotes have been controlled and tree and shrub cover in rangelands has increased. Thus, swift fox populations have severely declined in number and have become cut off from one another. Returning fire to the landscape may improve habitat for swift foxes.
Purple threeawn reproduces from seed and vegetatively from basal buds, the source for new tillers. While typically a minor grassland species, it increases with intensive disturbance and can persist at high levels decades afterward.
Although there is a wealth of knowledge of plant and avian responses to fire in the Great Plains, responses are not as well understood for arthropods, including insects, spiders, and their close relatives.
In Great Plains grasslands, grasses are typically the dominant plant life form because of their exceptional competitive abilities. When grasses are subjected to a period of intense grazing pressure, such as in the most recently burned patch of a patch burn grazed pasture, non‐grass plants in the same patch may experience a period of release from competition with the grasses.
Patch burn grazing is burning different patches of a pasture at different times and allowing animals to select where they want to graze. Originally conceived as an alternative to uniform utilization, patch burn grazing manages for vegetation structural diversity to conserve biodiversity while also sustaining the rangeland resource.
Fuel moisture is often listed as an important criteria for ignition in burn plans. Why does fuel moisture matter? Dryer fuels ignite at lower fire temperatures and burn more rapidly and more completely.
This is an interesting question given the diversity of standards in legislation and regulations related to certified prescribed burn managers (CPBM) across the region. In most states, statutory requirements for liability protection under either standard include a burn permit but are more variable with respect to the presence of a CPBM at the burn, written prescriptions, adequate personnel and firebreaks, and burn ban exemptions.
