Early March is generally a good time to control brush on a prairie. The snow is generally gone, and the prairie has not been burned yet, so the stems of…

Savanna burns can present problems when special trees are present within lush prairie grass. Flame heights may often be high, and may seriously damage even upper tree branches. Under such…

We keep pushing the burn season further back toward winter! Ten years ago we generally did our first burn in early April. In 2015 we did the first burn on…

Scientific research is a glorious occupation, and probably no category is more fascinating than field work in a National Park such as Yellowstone National Park. It was my good fortune…

Last night at the Blue Mounds Area Project meeting, part of Jeb Barzen's interesting discussion was on the remnant prairie/savanna at Wollersheim Winery. This site is famous in restoration ecology…

Digging through my files, I ran across this nice map of the restoration history of Pleasant Valley Conservancy I prepared back in 2014. It's out of date but still useful.…

It is still January, but it is not too early to think about spring burns. Right now is a good time to get more fire knowledge from the great webinars…

When we started restoration work at Pleasant Valley Conservancy in 1997 (almost 20 years ago), most of our savanna areas with calcareous soils were solid buckthorn. I remember those days…

I’ve posted on this before but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it. Restoration work, especially of oak savannas, results in lots of downed timber. Although good logs can be turned…

After a quite rainy autumn, the weather turned very favorable and we had a successful burn of our oak woodland on Thursday November 10, 2016. This has been one of…