image: Jon Henn leads a new five-year NSF project to look at the role of fuel variability in explaining grassland fires.
Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced new funding to understand and reduce grassland fire risk in the Southern Great Plains. The five-year project is being led by grassland fire expert Jon Henn at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“While forest fires attract more attention, grassland fires are actually responsible for burning more homes because they burn faster and often occur in highly populated areas,” said Henn, assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and Illinois Extension specialist; both units are part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.
Grassland and shrubland fires have been responsible for devastating damage in Hawai’i, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and California in recent years, but Henn says not enough research has been done to understand how fuel variability affects fire behavior. As part of the five-year NSF project, he will work with partners at Texas Tech University and the University of Colorado Boulder to measure grassland fuel characteristics throughout the Southern Great Plains, along with prescribed fire treatments, to predict how fuels drive fire risk.
Henn explains that grassland fuels — essentially, dry grass material — vary depending on habitat. For example, grasses grow bigger and faster in wetter climates like the Midwest, so there’s more material to burn when the grasses die. However, the amount of grassland on the landscape and the way that these ecosystems are managed — typically with grazing and controlled burns — varies across the Midwest and the Great Plains, and can have important effects on fire risk.
Prescribed fire treatments may reduce fuel load for a time, but unlike slower-growing forests, grasses grow back every year, creating new fuel. Learning how prescribed fire affects grassland fuel load in different habitats will help Henn’s team make evidence-based recommendations to land managers.
“By studying fuel variation and response to prescribed fire, we will develop mapping tools to estimate wildfire risk to help managers plan and reduce that risk,” Henn said.
Henn is a new faculty member in the College of ACES, where he leads the Grassland Ecology and Restoration Laboratory.