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Prescribed Fire as a Restoration Tool for Savanna Communities

Prescribed Fire for Forest Management Series

Prescribed Fire as a Restoration Tool for Savanna Communities

Feb. 7, 2024

Restoring Savanna Communities in Wisconsin with Rx Fire at Ecologically Meaningful Scales

Jeb Barzen focused on addressing the potential for restoring savanna communities in Wisconsin at ecologically meaningful scales through use of prescribed fire and through expanding social tools such as carbon credits or environmental labels. Most vegetative communities in Wisconsin, including a variety of savanna communities, are fire-dependent and the Wisconsin landscape is approximately 85% privately owned. A 10-fold increase in the implementation of prescribed fire is needed and our current capacity to implement those fires is limited by the number of trained people to burn safely and the incentives necessary to allow private landowners to deploy Rx fire sustainably over decades and across broad landscapes to achieve ecologically significant impacts.  ​  ​​ ​​

Brendan Woodall dove into the details on what he does as a Private Lands Biologist through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and discuss how fire is used as a restoration and management tool in savanna communities on private land. There are many barriers and limitations to actually being able to get fire on the ground safely, such as socially, financially, and logistically.

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PRESENTERS

Jeb Barzen

Chair, Private Lands Conservation, LLC; Chair, Wisconsin Prescribed Fire Council; Adjunct Assistant Professor, UW-Madison Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture; Lecturer, UW-Madison Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies​​

Jeb has spent most of his 36-year career studying birds and applying ecosystem restoration tools in wetlands, grasslands, and savannas worldwide. This includes conducting over 770 prescribed burns throughout the Midwe​st, in Vietnam and in the Russian Far East. While teaching prescribed burning in Russia, Jeb  can uniquely claim to be the only person to be quoted by Pravda as an ‘expert American arsonist.’ Early on in his career, it became clear that the most interesting projects would last well beyond his own lifetime, so Jeb soon began to focus on teaching, mentoring, and advancing the tools that we depend upon to improve ecosystem restoration – chief among them – prescribed burning and prescribed burn practitioners. To that end, Jeb recently collaborated with the Wisconsin Prescribed Fire Council, the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, UW Arboretum, The Wisconsin Chapter of The Nature Conservancy and numerous local NGOs to create a course on fire ecology and prescribed burn implementation at the UW-Madison which currently matriculates 24 students each ye​ar.

Brendan Woodall

Private Lands Biologist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program

Brendan grew up in Missouri, where he attended the University of Missouri – Columbia and graduated with a B.S. in Forestry and a B.S. in Fisheries and Wildlife. Brendan first cut his teeth with learning and implementing prescribed fire in college. Since graduating, he has worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – PFW Program helping private landowners restore and enhance wildlife habitat in central Wisconsin. He has assisted with over 50 prescribed burns and 13 wildfires totaling over 10,000 acres on both public and private land. This experience helps him to consider the potential for prescribed fire as a management tool when creating wildlife habitat restoration plans​.

MODERATOR

Michael Demchik, Ph.D.,

Professor of Forestry, College of Natural Resources, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

Michael Demchik grew up in southern West Virginia in unincorporated Pond Fork. With the freedom to explore the outdoors, a mountain on one side and a stream on the other, a future career in natural resources just made sense. Demchik is cu​rrently a professor of silviculture at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His previous positions included an Extension Forester specializing in farm forestry in Minnesota, a state Maple Syrup and Non-Timber Forest Products specialist in Pennsylvania, and a number of other jobs ranging across federal, state, and private industries in West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Additional Resources

Continuing Education

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If you are watching the recorded session and need continuing education credit, you must be registered for the series AND verify you watched the recorded session​. 

Certificates of completion are available by emailing wfc@uwsp.edu. Certificates will be emailed to you within 7-10 business days.

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Resources

Evaluation

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