Welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast, the official podcast of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

We are talking hunting, fishing and conservation with engaging guests and in-depth discussions with game and fish staff.

It's Arkansas Wildlife, the podcast for all things outdoors in the natural state.

Welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

Thanks for dropping in for another episode.

And we're we're on fire today on this episode.

I mean, literally, we're going to set stuff on fire now.

We're not going to set anything on fire here in the podcast studio.

But we're welcoming Emily Roberts.

She is prescribed fire coordinator for Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

Emily, thanks for jumping on with us.

Thanks for having me.

Well, you do set a lot of things on fire.

Before we get into some, you know, details about the benefits of fire and how we implement that here at Arkansas.

Game and fish.

Let's spend a little time getting to know you a little bit.

First time on the podcast, although you said you listen to the podcast before, actually to prep for, your interview.

That's pretty cool.

How did that come about?

That's right.

I was just doing some research before my interview for this position, and and saw that you did a podcast with Randy Brants, my predecessor, about two years ago.

So I was listening to that just to learn a few things.

Cool.

Well, where are you from and where you had.

How'd you arrive at Arkansas Game of Fish?

Give us a little bit about your background.

So I'm from central Arkansas and I went to college at UCA and I studied home grown right here.

That's right.

I studied environmental science, and there was a nature reserve on campus that I got to work in.

So I had a great professor there, Casey Larsen.

And she took a group of us students under her wing and taught us how to do fire on that little nature reserve.

There was like a five acre chunk of remnant tallgrass prairie.

I think I know exactly where that is.

It's like right off a donaghy, right?

Yeah.

Joe Moore nature reserve.

Yeah.

Taught us how to do fire, taught us how to do invasive treatments.

And so at that point, I was like, wow, this is great.

I want to do this for a career.

And so I did some seasonal jobs after that.

Got to go out west and then finally ended up back here with a different state agency, the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, for about five years.

And then I ended up here right now.

Well, that's a that's a pretty, pretty good, route to get here to Arkansas game and fish.

So I got to ask you like anytime we talked to the the biologists like yourselves that that love to get out there and you know, manage habitat.

But there's like a, there's like a pyro, streak in all of you do you.

I mean, what is it about this?

I mean, just because, like, our our our cave man, cave woman, like, ancestors like this, that want to make that fire.

I mean, yeah, it's great.

It's warm.

It's interesting to look at.

I've always loved a campfire.

There's just something about it.

Well, you do a lot of burning, in the course of your job.

I mean, just kind of give us a background of prescribed fire in Arkansas because you mentioned we've talked about it here on the podcast before, but it's still, I think, not as much as it used to be, but it's still a little bit misunderstood.

And and I like why fire is good.

I think we can't tell that story enough.

How would you kind of explain that?

Yeah, I think it all boils down to prescribed fire or not prescribed fire, but fire on the landscape as a natural disturbance process has always been here in Arkansas until humans kind of took it off the landscape.

And so what we're doing now is land managers.

We're just re reinstating a natural process that used to be in place.

Yeah.

Kind of get it back to what it did.

I mean, it's lightning strikes, things like that.

Native peoples.

Right.

Intentionally burning things.

I mean, yeah, all of the above.

Right?

That's right.

We have historic narratives that tell us that fire was on the landscape and frequently and also at large scales, there were early explorers that came through.

Thomas, not all Henry Schoolcraft.

They came through the state, and they were documenting these open landscapes that were very grassy trees were scattered.

You know, we see that here in the state now, but it's it's much less than it was back then.

They used to be more common having that that prairie savanna woodland matrix in outside of the obvious benefit of, you know, conserving our habitats, trying to return them to we'll never get them back to exactly the way they were.

Right.

But we're trying to get them closer to that.

But there's a lot of wildlife benefits as well, right?

Yeah.

That's right.

If you think about what you see, if you're driving along the interstate now, closed canopy woodlands, tons of stems per acre and not much grown on the ground.

Right.

It's a lot of leaf litter.

There's no wildflowers.

There's very few grasses growing under there.

So that's not much cover or food for wildlife.

Right.

And so in these systems that should be more of that prairie, savanna woodland, that's part of it is is burning off that leaf litter, opening up the canopy a little bit with fire and other timber management processes.

Sure.

To get that food and cover it back for wildlife and make it, you know, more usable for for wildlife.

And kind of if you would give us a little bit of that history about fire suppression.

Like what?

What happened.

Yeah.

So, you know, late 1800s, early 1900s, human population was increasing in the state.

Settlements were growing.

And so naturally, people didn't want fire encroaching upon what they've just built.

And so they would see these naturally occurring fires sweeping across the landscape.

And and they'd think, man, we have to stop this.

It's going to, you know, it's going to affect what we're doing here.

And so fire suppression became the norm during that time frame.

And to protect timber, to protect settlements.

And it wasn't until fairly recently, I mean, late 1900s, maybe even early 2000 that we're we're starting to regain some of that knowledge that we had, about prescribed fire and the benefits and managing landscapes with it.

What what was it was there like a tipping point or a watershed moment like in that, you know, 1990s, early 2000 because like, yeah, I, I've been here since so at Game and Fish since oh six.

And we were getting pretty serious about fire then.

But it was a relatively really new thing then.

What what happened in not just necessarily in Arkansas, but across maybe the southeast where where, you know, we begin to see more that implementation of intentional fire on the landscape.

What what was it?

I mean, did our knowledge just catch up with like or or did society change and opinions and attitudes change, or did we help convince people?

I mean, like, what was that kind of what happened to to like, get us back closer to what we're doing now?

Yeah, I think a little bit of everything that you just said, I mean, opinions changing in relation to fire, not seeing fire as, you know, just bad all the time.

But it can be used as a tool.

Lots of outreach by the large land management agencies.

You know, there's been acknowledged acknowledgments by those agencies to say that we were doing suppression in the past, but that's not the way forward.

We're going to have to change.

So acknowledge acknowledgments that we need to right move how we're going.

I guess a lot of it.

You just go out there and you see the results of not of suppressing fire and realize, like, we can't go on like this.

Yeah.

Looking at our habitats and realizing this is not working for us.

Right.

Well, okay, so moving in to the, I guess we're in, okay.

2026 now, third, third or fourth decade of the, third decade of the of the 21st century.

We're cooking.

We are really setting a lot of stuff on fire.

Now, how would you characterize our current, sort of state of affairs in Arkansas as far as far as a land management tool?

Yeah, I, I can't speak to total acres burned in the whole state, but we've got all kinds of partners working together, you know, burning individually, burning together on cooperative areas.

We partner all the time with Forest Service, Park Service, National Heritage Commission, Central Arkansas, Water Quail, forever.

We're all working together to get acres burned on the landscape.

Yeah.

I mean, and and and it's, it's I mean, that's not just our areas, our wildlife management areas, but you're talking about Forest Service lands, cooperatively managed stuff, all over, but it adds up to, a pretty good.

It's a pretty good amount.

What what is the I guess I'm trying to think of, like how to how to phrase this.

We've made a lot of inroads, but there's still, there's still progress to make.

But, how would you characterize, like, public perceptions of, of prescribed fire now, like, you know, after we've been doing it for, you know, 25, 30 years as an agency and with these cooperating partners?

Yeah, I think folks are, you know, learning more about Fire, especially through outreach.

We've got our new qualified prescribed burner law in place.

And folks, private landowners are taking those courses and and learning how to conduct fire on their own property.

Lots of people are seeing smoke from these agencies that are conducting burns and asking questions and and trying to figure out what's going on.

So, yeah, education is a big piece of it.

And I think in general, you know, folks are supportive of prescribed fire.

Yeah, I think when they see the results, I mean, you know, you walk across an area like, Harold Alexander WMR, which has been a lot of cedar removal, a lot of, those other things that go along before you do the fire.

That's a great example.

But like, you can't argue with the benefits, like said, like so thick that you can't even find a blade of grass underneath the cedar trees to, like all these rare plants that have been buried down in the, in the, in the soil that, you know, you thought were just gone, but they're there.

Yeah, yeah.

And we've seen great success stories like at Stone Prairie with the first successful quail hunt recently.

And, you know, that's that's due to the management that's gone out there, which is a combination of timber management and prescribed fire and restoring those grasslands that used to be there, because that's a property that when we acquired it in 2017, it was just extremely thick timber, you know.

Yeah, it had some high quality remnant stuff, but it had just grown too thick.

And so in restoring we've seen great success there.

Well, speaking of speaking of Stone Prairie, we shot some video out there last year and it was in the summertime, which is something that's a little bit different.

We're recording this in mid-March, and that's kind of despite March being a windy month.

It's kind of like February, March, April and early April has been our sort of window that that's changing.

How is that so.

Yeah.

So historically, you know, we burn about 70% of our acres in this February March timeframe.

And while we're going to continue, you know, conducting fire during this time, we're trying to shift, habitats that we can to burn in the late growing season.

And there's a lot of reasons why there's specific objectives.

We're trying to, to meet that are better met in the late growing season.

And when I say, like, growing season, you know, we have a really long growing season here in Arkansas.

Things start greening up in mid-February and then don't go dormant until, you know, mid-November.

But late grown season.

I'm talking about the historic lightning fire season, which is typically July to September.

Okay.

And so what are some of those things that you can accomplish in those, you know, later growing season fires as opposed to, you know, that February March window?

So, you know, growing season plants are growing.

So we have the opportunity to select for or against plants that we want or don't want.

And so we have the opportunity to change the plant community structure, which in a lot of cases when we have these restoration units, that's what we want.

If we're going from close canopy, forest to savanna, you know, with the lower basal area trying to promote the wildflowers and grasses, then that's a time frame that we're going to want.

Late grown season fire promotes forb diversity.

It also gives us the opportunity to target woody encroachment, which we have a lot of on our prairie and savanna units, you know, sweet gums, elms, burning during the late summer gives us the opportunity to have more of an effect on those stems.

They've spent the whole growing season devoting resources to a, you know, their structure, setting them up for failure, basically.

Yeah.

So we're giving them as much time to put energy into aboveground structures, and then we're going to hit them with fire in the late growing season so that by the time the winter comes around, they don't have as many resources to pull back down into the rootstock.

So if we do that repeatedly, we're going to have the effect we want on reducing those populations.

Gotcha.

So that's one example.

Yeah.

That's a that's a great one.

I mean, you know I think anybody that's spent much time outdoors knows how sweet gums can, can, can take over an opening in the forest for quickly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's shift gears a little bit.

You were tell you, you know, obviously is, prescribed fire program coordinator.

You're overseeing all of it.

We've we've recently you mentioned Randy Brandt's.

He was in your position previously, now moved over as assistant chief in our private lands habitat Division.

And that division does a lot of different things with landowners, but helping them get lined out for, to, to, to do these burns to implement prescribed fire on their private property is a big chunk of what they do.

You mentioned the the, certified.

Is that qualified prescribed by prescribed prescribed burner designation.

What does that mean?

And like what are we doing to to help folks get there.

Sure.

So qualified prescribed burner that came from act 695 that was enacted a couple years ago.

And so this act provides people with civil liability protection if they're burning and, you know, if something were to go wrong.

Right.

And so, in order to get that protection, you have to become a qualified, prescribed burner by taking a course.

It's a two day course that we offer in conjunction with the Arkansas Forestry Division.

And so take the course, get the certificate, and then when it comes time to burn, a qualified prescribed burner has to have a written burn plan on hand, which includes things like where the burn is, what the person's name is, what are the objectives.

And then, you know, if they do those things and meet the requirements, then they will get civil liability protection if something happens unless there's negligence involved.

Right.

And so I will say no cases have gone through this.

This act is so new, we're kind of waiting to see how these things are going to be interpreted.

But but that's the gist of it.

Yeah.

No.

Well, it seems like that's a really positive development in that, it does two things.

It, it provides some kind of requisite training.

I mean, we don't want people just going out there and dropping matches, right?

Yeah.

And it it encourages people it, it by giving them those protections to participate in this activity.

Whereas they might have had some, you know, qualms about doing so previously.

So yeah.

Sounds pretty cool to me.

Yeah.

And and beyond that, you know, we have our network of prescribed burn associations.

You read my mind.

That was going to be my next question related to that.

So you know, that's something that's touched on at the qualifier prescribed burning courses.

But we have a network of PBS.

We have 14 of them across the state, and that covers 50 of our 75 counties.

And so we do still have some counties that aren't covered.

So if anyone is looking at that map of PBS and their county is not covered, you know, consider becoming a leader.

Yeah.

Come on now.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So all that information can be accessed by just searching Arkansas game and fish and prescribed fire and that that would bring anyone to a page that has the information on the qualified prescribed burn, of course, is coming up.

Information on the PBA is it'll take them to a link of the Arkansas prescribed burn Association, where they can see all that, and also a link to the map of all of our private lands biologists for setting up site visits.

Awesome.

Great information.

Emily.

Let's get down in the weeds.

A little bit of the ashes, as it were here, and talk about, some of the kind of more fine scale stuff because I, I would like to leave our, our listeners with, and I was jokingly said, we're not we don't want people just going out there dropping matches.

There is a method to the madness.

Having, tried to shoot video some of these in the past and coordinating with folks just, the Goldilocks zone, that narrow little window that you have to jump through when you are going to do these fires.

It's pretty fascinating to me.

Like, I don't even know where to begin, what to ask you, but like, just kind of maybe start by telling us, like, how difficult it is just to just to get a fire going.

So, yeah.

Oh yeah.

There's all the work that goes into it before you even get into the field to conduct the fire.

You know, I mentioned prescribed burn plans that we have to make sure those are written, that they're in place, they're updated.

Those are going to state what the objectives for the unit are.

And it we never do a burn without having objectives.

That's so important that we know why we're burning.

So we know what kind of fire to apply.

And it'll you know, it'll go over how many resources we need, what kind of ignition techniques we're going to use, what the fire plans look like, how they need to be prepped, which then takes us into prepping the fire line.

So we'll have to go out there, you know, scout the unit, see what needs to be done.

Dead trees along the perimeter might need to be removed.

Firebreaks need to be installed or maintained.

And then, you know all that before we even get to the field and then right.

And then comes, you know, observing the weather, waiting for that prescription that you've written that's in the burn plan, waiting on a very specific wind direction.

Sometimes if you're burning next to a road, waiting for the right humidity levels, temperature, all of that, right?

So what you talked about what type of fire.

And I'm making an assumption here that like some of those things you just talked about, humidity, temperature, wind are all going to change the characteristics of that fire.

Is that what you're saying?

I mean, yeah, weather and also ignition techniques.

So, you know, if we have a unit we talked about prairie savanna, woodland matrix.

Those are very fire dependent habitats.

But we also have true forests.

Right.

Sure.

To tulip poplar, northern red oak, pawpaw trees.

So sometimes we have burn units that are so big, they include all these different fuel types and habitats.

And so we don't necessarily want a forest fire in the little forest north facing slope ravine, you know, but we want to have a good coverage burn on the south facing slopes and the west facing slopes where we might have more glades or savannas.

And so we would carefully think about what kind of ignition techniques we want to use there, which in this case might be just lighting the ridge tops with the ignition drone, or someone on a on a ATV torch and then letting the fire kind of naturally fizzle out when it reaches those forest, you know, wetter areas, instead of gridding out the whole unit and just, you know, forcing fires, forcing fire into an area that it might not naturally go right if it was a lightning strike or whatever.

Yeah.

That's right.

Cool.

It's got to be frustrating sometimes.

I know, is, someone documenting prescribed fire?

It was frustrating.

Like, oh, man, we.

Oh, this is the day.

It's be it now we can't go because of, you know, this factor that what what's that like when you wake up in the morning, you're really ready to go out there and do some great work on habitat, and you're like, oh, it happens all the time.

We just try to have a backup plan, you know?

Yeah, man, if we don't get this north when we need, what's a unit we could do with the South Wind?

Oh, we're always trying to think of a plan B like, have something else.

Like, well, we can't burn here, but we could shift gears and go over to this unit or.

That's right area and do something different.

Yeah.

That's right.

I've heard it cited.

I know it varies from year to year, but like, you know, the what is kind of a rough are a range of percentages of days when you're planning or, you know, fire and then you actually get to burn something and it's I know that's a ballpark if you can.

I mean, yeah, I mean, we really focus our planning efforts during seasons where we know we're going to get pretty good burn patches.

Yeah.

But, you know, we had a couple of times where we were trying to burn at Madison County earlier this year in the winter.

And it was just so gusty.

I mean, it's been such a dry, gusty winter and the gusts would be about, you know, 2 or 3 over what we really felt safe doing.

And so we had to call it off.

So that did happen a few times.

But overall, I'd say, you know, maybe 10 to 20% of the time we wake up and and think, we probably not the weather.

It's not not going to happen today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well that's good.

I mean, I guess like we've learned enough over the last 30 years of, of, of, of really getting serious about this that we're sort of refining and fine tuning our abilities.

Yeah.

And, and the weather sources, we have a great, you know.

Well, that's a great point.

I mean, 30 years ago, I mean, although like, you know, there were still satellites in space and, you know, all that.

But, I mean, our weather forecasting has become a lot more refined, you know, technology.

That's helpful.

What are some what are some places that you would point to, Emily?

Like some wildlife management areas or national forest units or some maybe just a handful of places that you would like.

If somebody that is not as familiar with what we do is listening to this, like, I want to see the results, give me a handful of spots that you'd recommend for folks to go out and look, or they're going to Turkey hunt this spring or yeah, follow a blue line to find a smallmouth bass or whatever.

Yeah, maybe some spots.

It's hard to name just a few.

I mean, we have no name.

As many as you.

You mentioned Harold earlier.

That's the area that so much management work has gone into.

And it I think it looks a lot different than it did just a decade ago.

Right.

And, Gulf Mountain in the same vein.

Okay.

That's a restoration work to promote savannah and woodland habitat.

We raised a covey of quail there with Clint Johnson back in, December.

I guess it was so positive results I can speak to.

Yeah.

Anecdotally at least.

Yeah.

And we touched on Stone Prairie.

That's part of that.

Grassland complex in central Arkansas.

Really remnant high quality stuff, awesome wildflowers and great habitat.

Yeah.

Awesome spot.

And as you already noted, one of the, two spots where last year we opened up a permit quail hunt, on public land for the first time.

Yeah.

That's right, another another data point that speaks to the success of of of prescribed fire program.

Yeah.

And I forgot to mention Grandview Prairie too.

Oh, yeah.

That's like.

Yeah, that.

Yeah, that's a pretty awesome spot.

Yeah.

Black land prairie, you know, awesome wildflowers again.

Just tons of firework that's gone out there.

Timber management.

Yeah I know we've got the woodlands, auto tour out at Camp Robinson, which is another, you know, if you want to take a drive and kind of read some of the interpretive panels there that explain different ecosystems and how fire has, has benefited that.

It's, it's a fascinating topic, for sure.

Emily, what else do we need to cover that we that we haven't?

I mean, they got a lot of a lot of fun stuff to talk about with fire, for sure.

Yeah.

I would just, I don't know, I really want to encourage listeners to get involved.

And I did want to say, you know, you don't have to be a landowner to become a member of a prescribed burn association.

You can live in the city and, you know, if you are interested in prescribed fire and maybe you want to own land someday, I think it's still be a great opportunity to work with other landowners and and help them burn on their property and just see how it all works.

Yeah, one thing we haven't touched on, and we usually try to make it a fire, is a very cost effective management tool too.

I mean, speak to that if you would.

I mean, yeah, the figures are, you know, all over the place, depending on, you know, who's giving them.

But anywhere from 20 to $50 is the going rate for prescribed fire, which makes it the cheapest management tool.

I know of.

Any timber management's going to be well above that value.

Sure, sure.

Well, Emily, thanks for, spending a little bit of time with us and talking about prescribed fire in Arkansas.

It's always an enlightening conversation.

And, again, you would encourage folks that are interested, go to ABC.com.

There's all kinds of resources there.

You can find out, as Emily noted, prescribed burn Association's what our, one of our, qualified prescribed burner workshops that we do with forestry.

So, check it out and, make make fire happen on, on on your little piece of of Arkansas.

And it'll it'll lead to great results.

Emily, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks, Trey.

That's all we got for this episode of the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

We'll talk to you next time.

So long everybody.