scholarly journals Factors Influencing County Commissioners’ Decisions about Burn Bans in the Southern Plains, USA

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 686
Author(s):  
Thomas W. McDaniel ◽  
Carissa L. Wonkka ◽  
Morgan L. Treadwell ◽  
Urs P. Kreuter
Keyword(s):  
Prescribed Fire ◽  
Woody Plant ◽  
Emergency Services ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Management Tool ◽  
Fire Departments ◽  
Woody Plant Encroachment ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
County Commissioners ◽  
Local Officials

Woody plant encroachment in North American rangelands has led to calls for greater use of prescribed fire to reduce fuel loads and restore grazing productivity and grassland biodiversity. However, the use of prescribed fire during periods when woody plant mortality is maximized has often been limited by temporary restrictions on outdoor burning enacted by regional or local governmental entities. This study reports the results of a survey assessing the familiarity with and attitudes toward prescribed fire in Texas and Oklahoma, USA, of officials tasked with implementing restrictions on outdoor burning and how these attitudes influence their decisions. Most responding officials considered prescribed fire to be a safe and beneficial land management tool that should be used more frequently. Self-reported familiarity with prescribed fire was the most significant explanatory variable for this attitude. Further, familiarity with prescribed fire was influenced by respondent participation in or being invited to participate in a prescribed fire. Such invitations came mostly from private landowners. Landowners wishing to use prescribed fire may benefit from building trust with local officials by demonstrating they are qualified to conduct such fires safely. This could help reduce the frequency of burn restrictions and may increase the likelihood that officials will grant burn ban exemptions to qualified burn managers. Additionally, because officials’ primary sources of prescribed fire information were reported to be local fire departments and emergency services, educating those entities about the benefits of prescribed fire for reducing wildfire risks could help reduce pressure on officials to enact or maintain burning restrictions. These findings highlight opportunities for reducing the frequency of burning restrictions, increasing opportunities for land managers to effectively halt or reverse woody plant encroachment.

scholarly journals Woody Encroachment Extent and Its Associated Impacts on Plant and Herbivore Species Occurrence in Maswa Game Reserve, Tanzania

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Houssein Samwel Kimaro ◽  
Ayoub M. Asenga ◽  
Linus Munishi ◽  
Anna C. Treydte
Keyword(s):  
Structural Changes ◽  
Woody Plant ◽  
Plant Cover ◽  
Fire Regimes ◽  
Management Tool ◽  
Herbaceous Plant ◽  
Woody Plant Encroachment ◽  
Species Occurrence ◽  
Game Reserve ◽  
Herbivore Species

Habitat degradation caused by woody plant encroachment has been a common phenomenon in savanna ecosystems. An increasing woody plant cover in open grassland reduces grazing grounds and, consecutively, impacts mammalian herbivores, but structural changes and their associated impact have rarely been assessed and quantified. We analyzed the extent of woody plant encroachment via remote sensing and used transects and plots to assess encroaching woody plant species and their associated impacts on herbaceous plant and herbivore species in Maswa Game Reserve, Tanzania. We found that woody plant cover had increased by 0.5% to 2.6% per annum over the last thirty years, while in other parts of the park it has decreased by 0.5% to 1.5% per annum. Acacia drepanolobium was the dominant encroaching woody species, and the number of stems in heavily encroached sites was seven times and three times higher than in open grassland and at medium encroached sites, respectively. In encroached plots, grazer and mixed feeder species occurrence were reduced while the presence of browser species was slightly elevated. Furthermore, our finding shows that bare ground cover is positively correlated with an increase of woody plant cover. Additionally, the number of herbaceous species slightly increased with the increase of woody plant encroachment, while the herbaceous cover was negatively correlated with the increase of woody plant cover. We suggest that fire regimes should be taken up to suppress the ongoing encroachment processes while strongly encroached sites might need mechanical intervention to control dense vegetation. This emphasis is on fire, particularly prescribed fire as a management tool of vegetation in Savanna ecosystem. We conclude that, woody plant encroachment is driven by different factors such as fire, mega-herbivores and topology that may interactively trigger woody plant encroachment in Savanna ecosystem.

scholarly journals Landowners' perceptions of risk in grassland management: woody plant encroachment and prescribed fire

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan N. Harr ◽  
Lois Wright Morton ◽  
Shannon R. Rusk ◽  
David M. Engle ◽  
James R. Miller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prescribed Fire ◽  
Woody Plant ◽  
Grassland Management ◽  
Woody Plant Encroachment ◽  
Perceptions Of Risk

Conservation and Restoration of Grasslands

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian J. Wilsey
Keyword(s):  
Community Assembly ◽  
Woody Plants ◽  
Woody Plant ◽  
Priority Effects ◽  
Woody Plant Encroachment ◽  
Humpty Dumpty ◽  
Alternate States ◽  
Density And Biomass ◽  
Acid Test ◽  
Stocking Rates

Conservation programs alter herbivore stocking rates and find and protect the remaining areas that have not been plowed or converted to crops. Restoration is an ‘Acid Test’ for ecology. If we fully understand how grassland systems function and assemble after disturbance, then it should be easy to restore them after they have been degraded or destroyed. Alternatively, the idea that restorations will not be equivalent to remnants has been termed the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ hypothesis—once lost, it cannot be put back together again. Community assembly may follow rules, and if these rules are uncovered, then we may be able to accurately predict final species composition after assembly. Priority effects are sometimes found depending on species arrival orders, and they can result in alternate states. Woody plant encroachment is the increase in density and biomass of woody plants, and it is strongly affecting grassland C and water cycles.

scholarly journals Drivers of woody plant encroachment over Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. S. Venter ◽  
M. D. Cramer ◽  
H.-J. Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Woody Plant ◽  
Woody Plant Encroachment

Policies

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-150
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Emergency Services ◽  
Public Private Partnerships ◽  
Cyber Attack ◽  
Fire Departments ◽  
Laws And Regulations

Local governments provide public services including police, fire departments, emergency services, and others. Operations are accomplished by following policies, laws, and regulations. Communities will need to integrate cybersecurity concepts into established community policies. Existing policies need to be reviewed for cybersecurity evaluating them for cyber integration and identifying critical services that could be disrupted or impacted by a cyber incident. Communities need to identify an authorization hierarchy that will makes decisions in regard to critical services being impacted by a cyber-attack. Roles need to be established and integrated into policies to identify existing capabilities to address cyber incidents and ultimately who will respond if needed. Public-private partnerships need to be reviewed and legal agreements crafted and signed before an incident occurs. These considerations are initial steps that can be taken as the community strives to improve its cybersecurity posture where community policies are concerned.

scholarly journals Estimating Fuel Consumption for the Upper Coastal Plain of South Carolina

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Goodrick ◽  
Dan Shea ◽  
John Blake
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Fuel Consumption ◽  
Prescribed Fire ◽  
Coastal Plain ◽  
Prescribed Burning ◽  
Management Tool ◽  
Fuel Load ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Continued Use

Abstract Recent changes in air quality regulations present a potential obstacle to continued use of prescribed fire as a land management tool. Lowering of the acceptable daily concentration of particulate matter from 65 to 35 μg/m3 will bring much closer scrutiny of prescribed burning practices from the air quality community. To work within this narrow window, land managers need simple tools to allow them to estimate their potential emissions and examine trade-offs between continued use of prescribed fire and other means of fuels management. A critical part of the emissions estimation process is determining the amount of fuel consumed during the burn. This study combines results from a number of studies along the Upper Coastal Plain of South Carolina to arrive at a simple means of estimating total fuel consumption on prescribed fires. The result is a simple linear relationship that determines the total fuel consumed as a function of the product of the preburn fuel load and the burning index of the National Fire Danger Rating System.

Woody plant encroachment into coastal grasslands: consequences for soil properties and plant diversity

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Kinnebrew ◽  
Lena K. Champlin ◽  
Gillian L. Galford ◽  
Christopher Neill
Keyword(s):  
Soil Properties ◽  
Plant Diversity ◽  
Woody Plant ◽  
Woody Plant Encroachment
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