Prescribed burning is the deliberate and careful control of fires to help prevent more destructive fires or to kill off unwanted plants that compete with commercial species for plant nutrients. This webinar will focus on a prescribed burning case study in Flint Hills, Kansas. This ecoregion is an economically and ecologically important area encompassing the largest tallgrass prairie ecosystem in North America. Prescribed fires are used annually to control invasive woody species and improve forage production for the multi-billion-dollar beef-cattle industry. However, burning releases harmful pollutants that can contribute to air quality problems for communities across a multi-state area near the burning site.

EPA ORD, EPA Region 7, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and Kansas State University collaborated to use EPA’s VELMA model to synthesize long-term experimental data to describe the combined effects of climate, fire, grazing, topography, and soil moisture and nutrients on tallgrass prairie productivity and fuel loads. VELMA, the Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessments Model, is a tool designed to model effective decisions for a wide array of environmental issues. It is a spatially explicit ecohydrological watershed model that planners can use to visualize the effects of their decisions.

Results provide (1) timely air quality and “to burn or not to burn” advisories during the Flint Hills prescribed burning season, and (2) technical support for exploring tallgrass prairie management options for balancing air quality, tallgrass prairie sustainability, and associated economic and health benefits for Flint Hills and downwind communities. This work is just one example of VELMA’s applicability for informing prescribed fire best practices across ecoregions – another is EPA’s 2021 publication describing a multi-model effort to compare environmental and health impacts of prescribed fire versus wildfire in western US forest lands.