Developing fire regimes and modeling fire restoration for abating the altered fire regime threat at scale Scott Simon, The Nature Conservancy of Arkansas Doug Zollner, The Nature Conservancy’s Fire Initiative Thank others - Tom Foti, Meryl Hattenbach, all of the burn and monitoring crews.

Fire Regime A set of recurring conditions of fire that characterize a given ecosystem Type Frequency Seasonality Behavior Severity Size and pattern For each ecosystem, needed to determine the range of variation for these components of the fire regime. Describe each one in general. - not the effect of fire on each individual species, but how fire works in that ecosystem. The species that occur there are adapted to it within its natural range of variation.

Anecdotal information and fire history There is a lot of anecdotal information that many people use a s a place to start. Tell settler story, when a lot of the people in the midwest burned (winter), the limited results we were getting, AFC wildfire data, we decided to experiment.

Hypothesis: Nearly all of Arkansas’ systems were fire-adapted and dependent. By determining historic fire regimes and ecological variation effects, we could efficiently reach our conservation goals. All of our systems were fire adapted in Arkansas. If we could reintroduce fire efficiently, we could reach our ecological goals for these ecosystems. If we could figure out the fire part all of the other stewardship/conservation/land management issues - non-native species, rare species, woody vegetation problems, diversity, etc would come along. The way we did it, we used Conservancy and partner sites as an experiment. And then set up experiment. We used the conservancy sites in Arkansas to experiment with prescribed fire on small places to infer what taking fire to scale and how we would do it in a very prescriptive way.

Fire behavior information Flame height, rate of spread, fire intensity Post fire effects monitoring Severity classes adapted from from Florida Understory severity Substrate severity Midstory scorch ht/% Midstory char degree Overstory scorch ht/% Overstory char degree Conducted four different types of monitoring as part of the iterative approach fire behavior monitoring - all three for both back fire and head fire

Plant community monitoring Quadrat- transect method 10 m radius tree plots 5 m radius shrub plots 1/4 m square herb plots, species assigned modified Daubenmire cover class 10 woody, 100 herb plots per transect Time series photo-points Rel. freq., cover, and dom. summarized in I.V

Used 5-step planning process in an adaptive management approach to track progress towards objectives in plans Reduce fescue abundance by 75% Increase herbaceous diversity by 50% Reduce cedar sapling abundance by 90% Maintain basal area of 50-70 What we started introducing specifics ecological objectives in site conservation plans and burn units plans. Adaptive manageemnt. We started getting prescriptive and adjusted our fires based on our monitoring. If we saw that we were not getting what we wanted, we changed our fire objectives.

Statewide results Drought fires more important in maintaining system than previously thought Winter burns aren’t as effective in reaching objectives Need to remove duff and increase ground layer light to get herbaceous response Size (flamelengths) doesn’t matter Some general thematic considerations An example of the statewide results - Especially when our fire leaders are going for moderately intense burns - an average, and they should be focused on designing the fire to reach the objective.

So we took all of this information and collated it into a general fire regimes for the vegetation types we worked in.

Maybe do a better slide for the first two. - Maybe have a handout

Fire Management Goals and Objectives Improve the usability of training areas Conduct prescribed burns on an average of 17,800 acre per year for three years, inlcuding fire management on all burn units with heavy training use. Reduce hazardous fuels / wildfires Prior to fire management, pre-treat 1000 acres on the post boundary each year through mechanical removal with minimal ground disturbance. And put the numbers and the prioritization in the plan =

Outcomes Experiment helped us understand the role of fire in Arkansas’ fire-adapted ecosystems. Shared the fire regimes with our partners using TNC sites as examples (collaborative training workshops, plan development, site visits, burns, and monitoring). Has consequently leveraged this experiment through partner action in threat abatement at a scale significant for the conservation of biological diversity. And got to work - outcomes at Fort Chaffee - 5000 acres, FLN But also statewide outcomes that went beyond just our ecological background. And no statistics. Relate this back to a statewide experiment to take fire management to scale. collaborative site visits, training workshops, plan development, burns, and monitoring