Interior Highlands & Fire Restoration Program

Open forests maintained with prescribed fire support a wide diversity of plants and animals.

Photo on left © Andrew Pursley. Photo on right © John Andre, USFS.

Preserves and Places

Simpson Preserve at Trap Mountain

Lyon Big Piney Creek Preserve

Baker Prairie Preserve

Presson-Oglesby Preserve

Cherokee Prairie Natural Area

Ecological Significance

Much of what people envision when they think of Arkansas, “The Natural State,” is shaped by beautiful images of the Ozark Highlands and the Ouachita Mountains. The oak forests, woodlands and savannas of the Ozarks and Ouachitas, which together are known as the Interior Highlands, are the largest intact remnant of a habitat that once stretched from Oklahoma to the middle Appalachians and Eastern Seaboard. In Arkansas, these mountain ridges and valleys serve as the headwaters of several large river systems, and the complex geological formations and soils have created tremendously diverse habitats for a wide variety of species. The Ouachita Mountains alone harbor more than four dozen species found nowhere else in the world.

Here one can also find small remnants of the prairies that once covered tens of thousands of acres in the Arkansas River Valley and higher in the Ozarks. At Baker Prairie in Harrison and several Cherokee Prairie conservation sites near Charleston, which are owned and managed by the Conservancy and the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, visitors can see tall native grasses and stunning wildflowers as well as rare grassland birds.

What We've Done

Over the last century, Interior Highlands forests were heavily cut. During the latter part of the century people began to realize this precious resource had been abused and took measures that – at the time – seemed logical; the forests were allowed to grow and fires were largely suppressed. The Conservancy’s work in the Interior Highlands began with a partnership formed in the mid-1990s with the U.S. Forest Service and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. After evaluating the declining health of the forests, the Conservancy and its partners developed a plan to restore fire as a natural ecological process in the Interior Highlands. Working through the Fire Learning Network (FLN), a nationwide partnership designed to evaluate and implement fire restoration, the U.S. Forest Service obtained Congressional appropriations for prescribed burns, which has resulted in large-scale restoration of national forestlands in the Interior Highlands.

Threats

Without natural understory fires, tree density increases substantially. In the Ozarks’ Boston Mountains, for example, coverage has increased from an estimated historical average of 52 trees per acre to today’s count of 148 trees per acre, plus another 300 to 1,000 young stems per acre. With more trees competing for nutrients and water, the forest system has become weak and vulnerable to drought, disease and pests like the red oak borer, an insect that has eaten its way through 1.6 million acres of Arkansas’ oaks in recent years. As dying oaks give way to maple, ash, elm and black gum, extreme pressure is exerted on the 150 animal and plant species adapted specifically to the region’s traditional, oak-dominated habitat. The crowded conditions also increase the risk of intense, uncontrollable wildfires.

What We're Doing

The Conservancy and its partners are working to restore balance to these magnificent forests and keep them healthy into the future. In recent years, the Conservancy and a partnership of federal, state and local agencies and organizations has restored tens of thousands of acres using prescribed fire and ecological forest thinnings at several demonstration sites. The projects, which are worked through the Fire Learning Network, number 15 sites in Arkansas and enable fire restoration on 300,000 acres. The Conservancy also hosts workshops for forest managers to share information on conducting safe and ecologically significant prescribed burns. Perhaps the greatest benefit from the demonstration projects is the incorporation of ecosystem restoration as a key component in the revised Ozark-St Francis and Ouachita national forest plans. The Conservancy worked with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, Audubon Arkansas, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to provide species and habitat information to the Forest Service in the plan revisions. Together, the team identified areas most in need of restoration, particularly fire restoration, as a way to reduce problems plaguing the forests, such as the red oak borer.

Fire restoration on private lands in the Interior Highlands (and elsewhere around Arkansas) has grown substantially since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded a landowner incentive program led by the Conservancy and other state agencies. Since the program began in 2004, the Conservancy in Arkansas has held several informative workshops, enrolled more than 50 landowners. The program is restoring native plant diversity and improving habitat for grassland birds, such as bobwhite quail.