A Potentially Influential Burn - Superior Street Prairie

This burn represented an important new approach - though it seemed so normal. 

The photo below could almost tell the story by itself. The long-time staff people from Illinois Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and their powerful equipment are all hanging back. Local resident and Friends restoration volunteer Sheba Abernathy spreads the fire with a drip torch. The crew is seventeen volunteers and two staff people from Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. Many neighbors volunteer here or at nearby sites. Many volunteers today are in their twenties and thirties. All are being taught skills and leadership by experts. 

In the background, if you look carefully, you can see a red fire vehicle and a DNR staffer standing idle. The DNR came as back-up ... and to observe and teach. 

Far too many precious preserves that need fire are not getting it on most years. The losses to nature are substantial. 

Below, today's burn boss, Jo Sabbath of the Friends, explains the plan. In the circle are three seasoned DNR staff - Chip O'Leary, Melissa Grycan, and Brad Semel. They brought ATVs with massive water-spraying capacity. But those staff and that high-powered gear will step back and sit out the burn.

A main purpose of the day is training, by the Friends and other experts, for new volunteer burn leaders and crew.

Above, A good backfire helps make the burn safe. Here, burn boss Genevieve Nano (front right) teaches Tauri Abernathy (front left, another preserve neighbor and brush-cutting volunteer here) some of the fine points of safe drip-torch work. 

Impressed by the day's work, some of us at the end discussed possible implications. The Nature Preserves Commission and partner land-owning agencies need more staff. To get it, they (and the Friends) need constituency and support. People here today are also learning about preserve needs - and becoming more personally committed to biodiversity conservation. 

The DNR's Brad Semel quoted Bill Kleiman on some challenging criticism. Bill, the director at TNC's Nachusa Grasslands, was an original organizer of the Illinois Prescribed Fire Council. Bill took time away from his Nachusa work to do that organizing because lack of fire is the single biggest threat to most Illinois biodiversity preserves. 

Bill challenged the DNR burn bosses. Bill noticed that he would go to a burn and see five or six burn bosses all at the same site. He'd ask, why weren't they all out burning five or six needy sites? But, as Brad put it, "People don't understand the staffing levels within IDNR. (See Endnote.) You can't do a burn safely with just a person or two. Developing partnerships has been invaluable in increasing our burning capacity.” 

The Friends have been proposing that we vastly increase burn capacity by training fifty or a hundred fit, smart, dedicated burn crew leaders and members. The benefits would be two-fold: 1) we'd get a lot more burns done during the best, safest burn days (relatively few on most years) and 2) there would be a lot more public exposure to the need and, thus, more support as we reach out to the elected leaders who decide how much funding goes to conservation. When citizens are volunteering to do crucial work that governments ought to do, elected reps see the need more clearly and provide more support . 

At the end - as fire boss Jo of the Friends talked with fire bosses Brad, Melissa, and Chip of DNR, it seemed good to all of us that Friends and DNR should explore an expanded collaborative effort to recruit and train scores of new burn crew members and leaders. 

Even if staff numbers and contract funding doubled, it's hard to imagine that to be sufficient to do all the burning, invasive control, and other stewardship needs for Illinois' 600+ Nature Preserves. But it's easy to imagine moving in the right direction with an expanded collaborative program including lots of local citizen participation.

End Notes

Below are a few more examples and insights from the day.

Harrison Bruch lights a "strip fire" through the center of the site, to speed the burn. Does this look dangerous? If you know what you're doing, it's not. 

Fire vehicle - very handy - but ... 

... although such vehicles can help, they are not required. There was not the remotest need for one at this burn. 

Oh oh. So close to all those houses! But see below.

At Superior Street Prairie, owned by the Calumet Memorial Park District, the neighbors are super supportive. Some have seen these burns for decades and know the preserve gets richer and healthier each time. Local neighbor liaison June Webb posted herself by those houses and answered questions from neighbors during the burn. 

Does the above video look threatening? Perhaps if you're unfamiliar with controlled burns. But in the center of the site, with burned fire-breaks all 360 degrees around, it's just safe nature doing what's needed. The smoke from this hot fire went up and out over Lake Michigan, not drifting through the neighborhood. It was planned that way. This is nature, healing itself, with a little help from the Friends. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks for edits and comments from Jo Sabbath, Rebeccah Hartz, Brad Semel, and Melissa Grycan. 

Endnote: Illinois Department of Natural Resources staff

As Brad suggested above, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources is woefully understaffed for biodiversity conservation - especially for burns, the single most important need of most prairies, woodlands, and wetlands. Also, separation of DNR Division responsibilities has hurt the burn program.  When the Division of Natural Heritage organized burns, it used to be that staff from the Divisions of Lands, Wildlife, and Forestry would rally to the cause. Today, not as much. Staff are short everywhere.  

Partnerships with county burn crews and not-for-profit organizations have been invaluable to the burn program. But there's still not remotely the needed capacity. Studies have shown that prairies and savannas that get burned less than at least every second year (typically one-half every year) are degrading, progressively. There are indications that the same could be said for oak woodlands. But most parts of most sites today get burned every third year, or fourth, or not at all. 

Both Natural Heritage and Nature Preserve Commission staffs need substantial increases to reverse ongoing biodiversity losses on high-quality state-owned lands and all nature preserves. Many of the staff burn bosses would welcome trained and fit volunteers to increase capacity.  

Volunteer crews like the folks who burned Superior Street Prairie could help reverse the losses, especially at smaller sites owned by local agencies without professional conservation staff. And volunteers (some of whom are on good terms with elected officials) along with the Friends, Illinois Environmental Council, and others can advocate for more resources. It takes a village. In fact, many villages. 

Many studies have supported these concerns. From one of them:

To understand long-term change … we re-investigated 62 prairie stands that were originally sampled in 1976 by the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory … With respect to change in species richness, higher quality prairies tended to be stable, while lower quality prairies increased in richness, presumably in response to fire management. We also found that alien species and woody vegetation increased across all sites, and that native species richness tended to decline as woody vegetation increased. Fire frequencies of about 50 %, i.e. biennial burning, appear necessary to maintain composition and structure of mesic and wet-mesic prairies, and few sites were burned at this rate. This appears to be causing long-term deterioration of many sites, and we propose that increased fire management will be needed to maintain these important natural areas.

From a study by Marlin Bowles (Morton Arboretum) and Michael Jones: CW Journal. July 2004. Pages 7-16.

Such studies are expensive and time-consuming. But we need more of them, for all fire-dependent communities, in all parts of the state. We can also learn from good studies in Missouri, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. More important, we need to learn from such studies, and act.