Road Through the Prairie Burn Poster

Two dormant trees flank a road cutting through a controlled burning of tallgrass prairie as the fire moves across the fields on a ranch in north central Kansas. The tallgrass prairie survives in areas unsuited to ploughing, such as this section of the rocky hill country of the Flint Hills, which run north to south through east-central Kansas. Once vast, tallgrass prairie has shrunk to only one to four percent of its former size in North America. Ranchers replicate natural fires when they burn the prairie every few years to destroy tree seedlings and alien plant species, which preserves the prairie as a grassland. The tallgrass prairie biome depends on prairie fires, a form of wildfire, for its survival and renewal. Such fires may either be set by humans (for example, Native Americans used fires to drive bison and improve hunting, travel, and visibility) or started naturally by lightning.