McRee Anderson
Friday, October 17, 2008 - 11:00-11:30
Collaborative fire management restoration depends upon landscape managers finding common ground in their understanding of ecosystem structure and function and desired ecological conditions. The Ozark-St. Francis National Forest, The Nature Conservancy, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, private landowners and others are collaborating to restore oak-hickory and oak-pine ecosystems in the Boston Mountains, which have been degraded from past timber management and fire exclusion activities. There are substantially more closed canopy forests and fewer woodlands/savannas today than occurred under the region’s historic fire regime, in which low intensity fires burned these systems about every 2-15 years. Plant and animal species, such as the royal catchfly, northern bobwhite, Bachman’s sparrow, Diana fritillary, Indiana bat, and elk are adapted to the vegetation mosaics that this frequent fire regime maintained. This collaboration faces other challenges as well: red oak decline has impacted at least 300,000 acres of Ozark National Forest, including the Big Piney Ranger District and intermixed private property, increasing hazardous fuels in the wildland-urban interface and threatening municipal water supplies. The Big Piney Ranger District and many partners are implementing a long term, landscape-scale ecosystem restoration project on 60,000 acres to increase forest health, restore fire dependent woodland ecosystems, protect municipal water sources and promote safety in the wildland-urban interface using periodic prescribed fire and forest thinning by commercial and non-commercial methods. A monitoring program is currently being implemented to track changes towards desired ecological conditions, which were described based on an ecological classification system.
Keywords: COLLABORATION, PRESCRIBED FIRE, FIRE RESTORATION, OAK WOODLANDS