N RANCHING
atural Resources
Wildfi re — Not Necessarily Bad By Gary DiGiuseppe
W
ILDFIRE: THE WORD FILLS MANY TEXANS WITH FEAR. And yet, for the ecology, the environment and even for production agriculture, fi re
can also mean hope. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there about
fi re,” says Dr. Charles “Butch” Taylor, Regents Fellow and professor at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Station at Sonora. “If you have a wildfi re that burns 1,000 acres, the headline is, ‘1,000 Acres Destroyed by Fire!’ How can you say that, when fi re is a naturally occurring phenomenon that has been taking place throughout the United States for tens of thousands of years? Instead of permanent damage, it’s actually benefi cial to the landscape.” In fact, fi re was a more frequent occurrence in the
distant past — because there was what Taylor calls a “natural fi re regime” caused by lightning and dry fuel and because Native Americans were using fi re on a frequent basis to manipulate the habitat and increase their hunting. As a result, the native vegetation and animals adapted to fi re resistance and recovery. But, Taylor says, “Once the livestock industry was
fi rst developed in the state, stocking rates were in most cases beyond the carrying capacity, and so the fuel was overharvested on a regular basis” — the “fuel” being the grass, brush, and other combustibles that raise a fi re’s intensity.
42 The Cattleman January 2016 “The effects of fi re being present or suppressed
are pretty much felt throughout the state of Texas,” says Dr. Morgan Russell, Extension range specialist for Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. “This is whether you’re in a wildland-urban interface area bordering San Antonio or the Dallas-Fort Worth area, or whether you’re in west-central Texas in the middle of a ranch that has been around for 5 generations. The effects of fi re suppression, or the direct effects of fi re alone, are felt everywhere from below ground to above ground. Whether it’s at a mid-seral stage of plant communities or late successional climax stage of the plant commu- nity” — that is, transitional versus equilibrium — all native plant vegetation has evolved with fi re and is dependent upon some frequency of fi re. Russell says that prior to European settlement fi re
struck the Great Plains region, north to south, every 1 to 6 years. It remains ever-present, more so in years when the fuel has been allowed to build, and less so in times of drought. “When we have years of below-average precipita-
tion, we just don’t grow the grass to support a fi re,” she explains. “In drought years, we typically see a short- term reduction of our native perennial grasses. They don’t die away. They just go into an induced dormant state below ground. “But bare ground may begin to accumulate, and in
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