As native vegetation like pine trees and wire grass begin to enter the growing season, the Alachua Conservation Trust is conducting various prescribed burns to support proper seeding and prevent wildfires heading into the summer months.
The dormant season in north Florida, including Alachua County, runs from November to March, after which the area enters the growing season.
Throughout Florida, the state and other organizations burn just over 2 million acres a year to manage Florida ecosystems. The Alachua Conservation Trust conducts the burns of about 20,000 of those acres.
“We do our part,” said Barry Coulliette, stewardship director of the Alachua Conservation Trust.
The Alachua Conservation Trust is a nonprofit regional land trust created to protect Florida’s critical natural lands from development and degradation.
In December, wildfires engulfed Southern California, exemplifying the importance of land management. Over 23,000 acres were burned in the raging fires of Los Angeles. Coulliette said he sees this as a representation of what happens when land is left unmanaged.
“Florida has a similar scenario, about every 10 to 15 years we have a lot of fire in our state,” Coulliette said. “Yet we’ve not had a huge amount of fires. And that's due mostly because of the dry burning we do in the state of Florida.”
Before joining the Alachua Conservation Trust , Coulliette worked at the Florida Forest Service for 36 years instructing prescribed fire training and conducting burns at various state forests and private lands in the north Florida region. He stressed the importance of increasing public knowledge of prescribed burns as purposefully burning natural habitat can sound negative.
“It’s a safe and effective way to manage our natural resources,” he said.
Prescribed burning is necessary to prevent large-scale wildfires because it removes dead materials that can be kindling for fires.
“You remove the fuel, you remove the fire,” Coulliette said.
Prescribed burns are also used in agriculture to renew the soil in between crops. It also creates new habitats for animals and promotes proper seeding of vegetation. Much of Florida vegetation, like longleaf pine trees and wire grass, actually require burning to properly seed.
There are many different weather factors that the Alachua Conservation Trust monitors to ensure a safe and effective fire. The time of day of a burn is important for the spread of fire, heat and humidity levels change throughout the day. Surface-to-volume ratio of the kindling is also important. Dead, fallen pine needles are thin and long which means they burn quickly. Removing those prevents wildfires from getting out of hand.
Kestrels are used to help read the weather, which is updated hourly during a burn to ensure conditions are remaining safe to proceed.
While Coulliette says that the fires are conducted safely, wildfires like those in California at the beginning of the year have caused people to think prescribed burns are unsafe or put their homes at risk. In actuality, it's the opposite.
“It creates an environment where we can do prescribed burning in a safe manner to remove the fuel so we don’t have catastrophic fires, like in other places in the United States and other places in the world that's going on right now,” Coulliette said.