OSU researchers get grant for fire

Jacob Longan - NewsPress

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken notice of interdisciplinary research being conducted at Oklahoma State University.

Drs. Kristen Baum (zoology), Mason Reichard (veterinary pathobiology) and Sam Fuhlendorf (natural resource ecology and management) were awarded a $376,000 grant by the USDA to study the effects of fire on disease control and pollination in native grassland. They are specifically looking at the difference between patchy and whole-field burns.

Their preliminary data shows there may be a smaller tick population among cattle that forage in a patchy-burned area than in a whole-field burn.

That may seem counterintuitive, but Baum said there are variables.

“You have to add in the other animals that are there,” she said. “You are dealing with range land, grazing cattle. There are other small mammals and larger grazers like deer that might also be using those sites. There are other factors that go into that as well.”

Baum is the pollinator expert of the group. She said fire creates plant diversity and a different structure in the plant community.

“A lot of it has to do with interactions between ticks and cattle,” she said. “It is mainly those interactions that bring up the interesting patterns.”

Reichard, the tick expert, said the changes in the population of the parasites is due to the cattle spending more time grazing in the burned areas, which have less vegetation and thus are not as conducive to ticks.

This project is a good example of the university’s new focus on interdisciplinary research, he said, with “different disciplines, different departments, different campuses and different agencies” collaborating.

Fuhlendorf has been conducting fire research for 10 years and sets up the burns for this project. They involve whole-field burns as a control group and pattern burns for the patchy effect.

“Historically, bison were free-roaming and fires occurred and the bison would be attracted to the burned areas,” Fuhlendorf said. “This project is intended to be sort of an extension to that for landowners and finding ways we can figure out lessons from the bison through millennia and understand how grasslands evolved through fire and grazing and then we can apply that. That could be a useful tool.”

He is also a big proponent of collaborative research.

“You can’t get a really broad sweep like this without going across a lot of departments,” he noted.

Dr. Loren Smith, head of the zoology department, said OSU would not have received this grant — which he described as prestigious and highly competitive, going to no more than 10 percent of those who apply — without using an interdisciplinary approach.

“Complex questions require a really good team of researchers,” he said.

The three-year grant is funded by the USDA-CSREES-NRI-Managed Ecosystems program.