VIDEO: Grasslands span from the Great Plains to the foothills of Colorado, and fires are a natural part of the ecosystem. But as more people have moved into these areas, the threat of a wildfire’s destruction has prompted local emergency agencies to rethink their strategies. In the wake ofย the Marshall Fire, city and county leaders in Boulder asked researchers at the University of Colorado about fire behavior. These conversations led to a research effort at the university’s Boulder campus that could change how agencies handle fire mitigation in grassland suburban areas.
“This fire is critical to the health of these grasslands, essentially, but they do pose risks. So how do you balance that?” said Jonathan Henn, who is a part of the research team. ย Some key research involves the ecological impact of fires in grasslands as well as its behavior and what mitigation — like prescribed burns — could be most effective.
“They’re very fast fires,” Henn explained. “Because there’s sort of nothing stopping wind, they’re really wind-driven fires.” Unlike fires in the forest, where mitigation is typically a once-every-few-years effort, something like a prescribed burn in the foothills or high plains requires a different approach. “In the grasslands, if you reduce the biomass, that might work for a bit. But it’s all going to grow back the next year, potentially even more than last year,” said Henn.
