This study is unique, because it actually used mean coefficient of conservatism as a response variable, which is a much better variable to assess outcomes with, because conservative species are those associated with old growth, richness can be, but richness can also increase during early stages of degradation.

Anyway, this links to the article, McFarlane et al. (2023).

I have one quibble. The article cites Collins (2000) for historical fire frequency (3-5 years). That is not an appropriate citation, because historical fire frequency was not the topic studied in the paper. I knew that the moment I saw it, because of my history with Konza. Collins (2000) cites a fire frequency “hypothesized” in Wright and Bailey’s book Fire Ecology (1982). Citation practices like are unintentionally misleading, because the uncertainty and context drop away.

The right thing to do is go to the source and evaluate critically if it is the best information available. Otherwise, it would be no different if someone next year cited McFarlane et al. for the 3-5 year return interval, and on and on and on. I think it’s something all of us that have written an academic paper, term paper, Dissertation, or Thesis have done. But we need to do better, and editors and reviewers need to do better. There is also some bias to cite newer work, which isn’t necessarily better just because it is more recent, and certainly if it was testing the hypothesis that the citation implies.

There certainly is a boatload of information from historical accounts that fire was more frequent than that, and I would argue that the poor persistence of prairie biota due to degradation of sites burned at that frequency is also strong evidence that it is wrong. Fire scar data from oaks on prairie-oak mosaic landscapes falls in the 3-5 year ballpark, but those are fires of high enough intensity to scar oaks–even on the in the more sheltered locations (leeward from streams/rivers, north and east aspects) where they tended to be more prevalent. Very frequent fire usually means less fuel and lower intensity.

Still, this is important research that says what many of us have already learned–we must have continued interaction with planted prairies. We need to treat them like prairie if that’s what we want them to be, and that means burning a lot and ensuring that propagules can get there. I say this all the time now, but it is the low/no thatch condition maintained by frequent (or annual) fire that gives the species that arrive the chance to assemble into a diverse and interwoven prairie community, AND it is what allows that to persist once formed. And this is particularly true when fire occurs between autumn and very early spring.