In an effort to restore and maintain wildlife habitat, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission conducts prescribed burns across tens of thousands of acres of state game lands each year.

To find out whether smoke you’re seeing on state game lands is from a prescribed burn, check out the commission’s prescribed burns dashboard mapping system.

To help support wildlife on most of the 2 million acres of state game lands used by hunters, anglers and wildlife watchers throughout the state, the agency sets about 200 to 300 prescribed burns across 20,000 to 30,000 acres ever year.

“Most of the prescribed burning on game lands occurs between January and March because the cool, humid air with minimal wind provides conditions for low intensity fires,” Commission Forestry Program Leader Casey Phillips stated in a release. “However, we will still conduct burns well into spring and summer, because growing season fires provides for better control of young hardwoods in certain habitats.”

Prescribed fires are more cost efficient than mowing and spraying because they reduce the use of hazardous fuels, such as leaf litter and pine straw, and improve biodiversity at a significantly larger scale than chemical or mechanical methods alone, according to the agency.

Maintenance burns are typically conducted in multi-year cycles to open groundcover for quail, grassland birds, deer and turkeys. Prescribed fires are also crucial for many of the state’s habitat-sensitive or rare species, including red-cockaded woodpeckers and Venus flytraps, which are adapted to fire or found only in fire-dependent habitat.

“Fire is a natural occurrence that native wildlife has adapted to,” Phillips stated. “We also use burning techniques intended to give animals time and room to escape. After an area is burned, we typically see new vegetation within a few weeks, which means the animals won’t be far behind.”

For additional information, view No Cause for Alarm and visit Prescribed Fire: What NC Citizens Need to Know.

State officials are reminding folks that the open burning of trash, metal, plastic and all other human-made materials not only harms the environment and poses a public health risk, it’s against the law.

Careless debris burning is the leading cause of wildfires in North Carolina, and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Air Quality has issued a reminder that, “If it doesn’t grow, don’t burn it.”

Open burning is only allowed in limited circumstances and only for vegetative materials like leaves, limbs and yard debris.

The open burning rule, the state’s oldest air quality regulation, limits what can be burned outdoors and when.

The rule also stipulates the following:

• Residential yard waste and commercial land clearing burning can only occur between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. No new vegetation can be added to a burn pile after 6 p.m.
• Burning is only allowed when the air quality forecast is Code Green or Code Yellow. Burning on Code Orange, Red or Purple days is prohibited. Check your county’s air quality forecast at the online Air Quality Portal.
• Yard waste must originate at a private residence and be burned on that site. In other words, residents can only burn vegetation from their own yard — not yard waste from other homes or locations.
• Burning of yard waste is only allowed if permitted under local ordinances and only if public pickup of yard debris is not available.
• Campfires, outdoor cooking fires and bonfires are permissible, unless prohibited by local ordinances or temporary burn bans, provided that only vegetation such as firewood is burned. Fires must be controlled and never left unattended.

Amid the ongoing cleanup from Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, special provisions are in place through the end of March “to help facilitate efficient and safe processing of vegetative disaster debris in impacted counties,” officials said. While grinding or chipping wood debris is preferable, guidance for burning debris is available online.

Commercial land clearing operations are also limited by the open burning rule. Land clearing is the uprooting or clearing of vegetation in connection with construction, development or mining, or the initial clearing of vegetation to enhance property value. Officials said the burning of this debris must comply with all open burning rules, including the following restrictions:

• The vegetation should originate on the site where the burn is taking place. (Land clearing waste can be transported and burned at another site up to four times a year only if specific conditions in the open burning rules are met).
• Kerosene or diesel fuel may be used to start a land-clearing fire, but no other man-made materials can be burned.
• Land clearing burn piles must be at least 500 feet from occupied structures and at least 250 feet from any public road when the prevailing winds are blowing toward the road. Information on wind direction is available from the National Weather Service.

The Division of Air Quality enforces the state open burning rule, partnering with local law enforcement, firefighters and fire marshals, and the N.C. Forest Service to ensure compliance. Violators can be fined up to $25,000 per violation per day. To submit an open burning complaint, contact the DEQ Regional Office that serves your county. Anonymous complaints can be submitted via an online tool.

The N.C Forest Service may require an open burning permit before certain fires are lit, including fires in protected areas. The Division of Air Quality does not issue burn permits. Burn permits are available through the N.C. Forest Service’s online application at ncforestservice.gov/burnpermit or by contacting a local N.C. Forest Service county office or local permitting agent. For more information, contact the N.C. Forest Service.

County and municipal governments may have more stringent burning restrictions than state law. Contact your local officials to learn what burning rules may be in place where you live.

The open burning rule includes exceptions for certain special burns, including firefighter training exercises and prescribed burns.

Undergraduate students who spent their fall semester studying Currituck Sound may have broken new ground in understanding the effects of controlled burns on a marsh island.

For the project, students compared vegetative changes to the marsh islands with the Audubon Pine Island Sanctuary and Center in Currituck County that have no history of recent fire, islands that are occasionally burned, and islands that have had frequent controlled burns.

The students presented their findings “The Sound of Change: Responses to Controlled Burning and Other Changes in the Currituck Sound,” Dec. 12 as part of the monthly Science on the Sound lecture series at the Coastal Studies Institute, or CSI, on East Carolina University’s Outer Banks Campus.

The students conducted the research project as part of the Outer Banks Field Site, or OBXFS, a semester-long, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill undergraduate program hosted each fall by CSI.

Controlled burns are part of a fall tradition that existed well before the first European set foot upon the North American continent and “has deep historical roots in the South, where the practice was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers,” according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research.

While there have been a number of studies examining how a controlled burn effects a marsh, delving into a fire’s impact on invasive species, soil accretion, plant diversity and potential of endangering some animal species, this research takes a different approach.

The study “was one of the few that worked in brackish marshes, and the students talking to stakeholders and users of the marsh about the changes they perceived is also something that’s, I think, unique to the study,” Outer Banks Field Site Director Lindsay Dubbs said during the presentation.

The students included a human dimension and interviewed people who use the Currituck Sound frequently about the environmental changes they feel have taken place.

For their field work, the students traveled to marsh islands within the boundaries of the Pine Island site and compared the effects of controlled burning on marsh vegetation.

The islands were divided into three groups. The control islands had “no historical data of any burns happening,” explained sophomore Lily Bertlshofer. “Our occasional sites were last burned in 2021 and our frequent sites have data being burned every year.”

The study was designed “to look at how controlled burns impact the allocation resources within marsh plants and soils, the impacts of controlled burning on the vegetation community of marsh and what the implications for marsh resilience are,” Berlshofer said.

The study confirmed that the long-established practice of prescribed burns benefit vegetative diversity in marsh inlands.

At first glance there does not appear to be a significant difference in plant diversity among the three areas.

“We found that there was no statistically significant relationship between species richness and burn frequency,” said Veronica Cheaz, a sophomore.

That finding was expected. Because the number of plants that can live in a salt-to-brackish environment is limited, diversity is relatively low.

“Generally, we found low species richness at all of our plots, which is not very surprising,” Cheaz said. “We have a brackish marsh in the Currituck Sound, and there’s not going to be very many species.”

What the study did identify, though, was how effective controlled burning of a brackish marsh could be in maintaining the habitat.

“We also looked at salinity tolerance,” Chaez said, which “is going to be influential in determining how effective these sites are at adapting to environmental stressors like sea level rise and a rise in salinity. We found that occasionally burned sites had the highest scores compared to our control sites, and we hypothesized that this is because occasionally burned sites have a balance of the disturbance periods and restoration periods that allows salt water species to move in.”

There was at least one surprising finding. When the living root systems, or the biomass, of the three sites were compared, the frequently burned areas have statistically greater biomass than either the control or occasional burn areas.

Pointing to a graph showing more than double the biomass of an occasional site, senior Katelin Harmon, majoring in environmental studies and political science, described the finding that “frequently burn sites were much higher,” as “one of our most interesting findings…There’s much stronger root systems in our frequently sites.”

Verdant and complex, the Currituck Sound marsh is somewhat unique. The nearest saltwater source is Oregon Inlet some 55 miles to the south of the study area at the Pine Island Audubon site. The salinity there is typically under 3 parts per thousand, or ppt, and at times lower.

“The low salinity makes these places special, and we refer to that as an oligohaline environment,” junior Thomas Ferguson said during the presentation.

Currituck Sound has not always been an oligohaline, or a low-salinity, environment. Throughout the colonial period and into the early 19th century, there were two inlets on the north end of the sound. Currituck Inlet across from Knotts Island was open until the 1730s. New Currituck Inlet just to the south, opened soon after that, closing in 1828. Until New Currituck Inlet closed, the north end of the sound was a high-saline brackish marsh.

With the closing of the inlets, Currituck Sound transitioned to an oligohaline marsh and migratory waterfowl began arriving by the hundreds of thousands, creating a hunter’s paradise.

“In 1828 the Currituck Inlet, at that time composed of salt water, was closed by a storm and the vicinity gradually became fresh water. This change allowed vegetation such as wild celery and eel grass to grow on the marsh bottom and this new vegetation attracted wintering fowl in greater quantities than before,” The National Register of Historic Places noted in its assessment of the Currituck Shooting Club.

The Currituck Shooting Club, founded in 1857 “by a group of business men in New York City,” the assessment wrote, was the first of numerous hunting clubs that lined the shores of Currituck Sound. The building was completely destroyed by fire in 2003.

The Pine Island Club was formed in 1910. In 1979 the last private owner of the club, Earl Slick, a Winston-Salem developer, donated 2600 acres of marsh and uplands to the National Audubon Society. In 2009 Audubon North Carolina assumed full-time responsibility for the managing the club.

Hunting is still allowed on the property, but according to at least one of the hunters the student researchers interviewed, it falls well short of what it had once been like.

“It really doesn’t have any ducks compared to when I was young, when I was your age, this place had ducks. This place doesn’t have anything anymore,” the researchers were told.

In a question-and-answer session following the presentation, Pine Island Site Manager Robbie Fearn noted that the statistical biomass findings at the frequently burned areas was inconsistent with what was visually happening.

“I’m at the Pine Island Sanctuary,” he said. “The areas that are frequently burned from my lived experiences are falling apart, and yet the data says that for longer term management, frequent burning may be better… Is it a question of the plants are responding to the frequent burn by trying to survive and creating more below-ground biomass.”

For Fearn, who was very complimentary of the work the students did, the inconsistency between what he has observed and what the statistics say is a jumping off point for much needed further research.

“The work that these students have done have really set us up to dig in and figure out how best to manage these marshes in the sound and I’m very thankful for their work,” he said.

Coastal Review will not publish Jan. 1 in observance of New Year’s Day.

Second part in a series.

While wildfires are almost always the result of human activity, climate change is altering wildfires and how they’re managed.

North Carolina Forest Service Public Information Officer Philip Jackson said that while nearly all wildfires in the state correlate with human activity, climate change is affecting the nature of wildfires different ways.

First, the way precipitation falls is changing and becoming more extreme, Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis said in an interview. “Instead of rain evenly spread out throughout a season or year, heavier rainfall is happening on fewer days with longer dry spells in between.”

Warming temperatures are an important part, too, and are making dry spells more severe and prone to wildfire activity. This has been especially apparent within the past few years. Last fall and again in June of this year, the state slipped into drought after just a few weeks of hot, dry weather.

“At both times, parts of the state went more than 20 days in a row without a drop of rainfall all while we were dealing with unseasonably warm temperatures — above 100 degrees in some areas earlier this summer,” Davis said. “Just like in your backyard garden, forests and other fire-prone ecosystems dry out in a hurry during times like that, and that brings the threat of wildfires.”

The State Climate Office, based in Raleigh, uses a handful of tools to monitor climate change and its effects, including measuring and archiving weather observations from more than 350 weather stations across the state, almost half of which have at least 30 years of historical observations.

Davis said this helps with understanding not only what current conditions are like, but also how conditions are changing, “and we’re consistently seeing more extremes in all directions.”

Most recently, that has been record rainfall totals in from Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Earlier this summer, conditions were extreme heat and dry weather. Davis’ office can use that kind of historical data to add context to those events. He cited Greenville as an example: The Pitt County city saw its longest streak of dry weather — 23 consecutive days without rainfall — since the fall of 2000.

The office is involved with research and partnerships that are helping explore climate change and its impacts, as well.

“Heat-mapping campaigns have shown us how much hotter certain parts of cities can get depending on their land use and land cover. There are applications there for forests, too, since we’ve found at a very micro scale on NC State’s campus, for instance, how bare ground and a lack of tree cover can affect surface temperatures,” he said.

That data, research and those partnerships all came together in the North Carolina Climate Science Report that the state climate office helped compile in 2020.

The report includes some key findings and projections related to wildfires, including a projected 300% or more increase in the number of weeks with the risk of very large fires, or burning more than 5,000 hectares – nearly 12,400 acres – by the middle of this century, compared to the end of the last century.

“And it notes that increases in temperatures and associated drying rates are very likely, with future droughts very likely to be warmer with a higher chance of wildfires,” Davis said.

Temperatures across the state are trending warmer in all four seasons, but it’s especially remarkable how much winters have been warming. According to the Climate Trends Plotter tool, the winter average temperatures in eastern North Carolina have been increasing by 0.5 to 0.75°F per decade over the past 50 years, and by more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade in most areas since the year 2000.

“That’s having the effect of shrinking our winter seasons, and on the shoulders especially in February, we’re seeing more spring-like weather. That’s threatening to begin our spring fire seasons even earlier, and have them last even longer,” Davis said.

“We also see those changes reflected in future projections,” he continued, siting one study that projects a 74% increase in the area burned by lightning-caused wildfires in North Carolina between 2011 and 2060. “That’s a product of both longer fire seasons and warmer temperatures throughout the spring that make fuels more susceptible to burn.”

Other research shows more than a 200% increase in the number of days with suitable conditions for very large wildfires, which burn more than 12,000 acres, along the state’s coastline.

“Historically, these events have been very rare since they require all of those weather ingredients — extreme dryness in place with warm temperatures, low humidity, and high winds — for fires to grow that large in our region. But they’re expected to happen more often in the future,” Davis said.

Prescribed burns and climate change

Jackson explained that prescribed burns benefit forests and wildlife while reducing the risk and impacts of future catastrophic wildfires. The goal for these hazard reduction burns is to reduce the understory shrubs, vines, woody debris, needles and leaves that may be available to burn during unplanned wildfires.

“We will burn it in a planned manner that is of lower intensity, eliminating those fuel sources, helping prevent future wildfires or minimizing impacts from future wildfires. Low intensity prescribed fire also helps manage forestlands where many species require frequent burns to establish and thrive,” Jackson said.

The Forest Service also uses prescribed fire for site preparation purposes, also known as site-prep burns.

“These prescribed burns occur after harvesting to assist with reforestation activities. It allows for planting natural regeneration of tree seedlings, it’s less invasive and damaging than mechanical site preparation and is sometimes conducted as a pre-treatment to tree planting,” Jackson said.

Davis said that there’s been a lot of success with prescribed burns in North Carolina, and even though there’s still wildfires, those events are typically more manageable and less severe because of proactive prescribed burning practices, “But it’s already getting tougher to find windows to do this burning, and that problem is expected to become even worse in the future,” for a few reasons.

One, North Carolina is a fast-growing, fast-developing state, and we’ve got more acreage classified as wildland-urban interface than any state in the country, Davis explained.

“That means when we want to do burns in these natural areas, it’s more likely that people will notice it, so land and fire managers have to be very careful about burning when the wind direction is just right and making sure burns don’t linger overnight, when smoke can get trapped near the ground,” Davis said. “But climate change is also affecting our ability to burn. We’re getting fewer of those Goldilocks days when it’s not too wet or not too dry to have a successful burn, and the rapid changes from wet to dry patterns are making it tough to anticipate those periods.”

Historically, the most common times for burning in the spring and summer are becoming less suitable for burning as conditions then are hotter and drier, Davis said.

He explained that a study of the Southeastern United States looked at the suitability of prescribed burning based on projected weather conditions, and it found a sharp decrease in the number of suitable days in the transition seasons, or spring and fall, with the summer expected to become almost entirely unsuitable for burning by the end of the century.

“That’s largely driven by the warming temperatures, which makes the atmosphere less stable, the vertical transmission of heat and dispersion of smoke less predictable, and fuels drier so that they burn hotter and flames spread more quickly,” Davis said. “That’s all adding up to a big concern that we’ll see more frequent and more severe wildfires, with fewer opportunities to manage our forests in North Carolina to help avoid those events.”

Jackson said that the Forest Service predetermines weather and fuel parameters needed in order to safely execute a prescribed burn operation.

“If the weather doesn’t produce the ideal conditions that we need to safely carry out a burn, we simply won’t do it,” Jackson said, explaining that he has driven two hours to Stokes County, geared up in full personal protective equipment along with a dozen other personnel to conduct a prescribed burn, “only to cancel it before ever lighting a torch and putting fire on the ground. The weather either gives us what we need to carry out a burn safely, or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, we simply live to fight another day.”

North Carolina is home to nearly 4,000 species of plants. A small percentage of them, but some of the most unusual, can be found in the Green Swamp Preserve, a 17,424-acre nature preserve managed by The Nature Conservancy.

The Green Swamp Preserve in Brunswick County, about a 40-minute drive southeast of Wilmington, remains closed after a recent wildfire, the result of flames escaping the area of a prescribed burn that was in process in June. The fire spread across most of the preserve, covering nearly 16,000 acres and prompting state air quality alerts.

But once it reopens later this summer, visitors can see 14 species of carnivorous plants, 16 species of native orchids, and other endangered wildflowers on the sun-dappled ground beneath a tall longleaf pine canopy.

The recent blaze was prevented from reaching any nearby private property, and due to the distinctive nature of the fire-adapted longleaf pine ecosystem — and conservancy’s management practices, which included a successful controlled burn in January — it’s more a problem for people who wish to explore the area than the plants that live there.

“There are already grasses popping up in the preserve,” Michelle Ly, conservation coordinator for the conservancy’s southeast coastal plain office, explained last week to Coastal Review. She noted that they expect to see some plant species recovering in areas where they previously had been crowded out by taller vegetation. “This wildfire and burnout will benefit the preserve greatly.”

The Nature Conservancy also hosts a “Fire in the Pines” festival in Wilmington, where visitors can learn how controlled burns help plants and animals in these coastal environments and watch a live demonstration burn. This year’s festival is set for Oct.14.

With the recent containment of the blaze called the Pulp Road fire, conservancy officials and scientists on Thursday led a media tour of a part of the preserve that was unaffected by the most recent fire but that was subjected to the controlled burn in January.

The area of the media tour was lush with color and new growth emerging from the char below.

Protecting star species

The star plant species of the Green Swamp Preserve include a huge range of carnivorous plants: Venus flytraps, sundew, bladderworts, butterworts, and four species of pitcher plants.

The conservancy works to ensure the Green Swamp remains a healthy, balanced ecosystem for these specialized plants. It has taken care of the land since 1977, when the Federal Paper Board Co. gifted it nearly 14,000 acres. The company donated an additional 2,577 acres in the late 1980s. Over time, the conservancy has purchased the rest.

The conservancy’s conservation activities center on the longleaf pines that tower above the understory layer. These trees once covered about 90 million acres of the Southeast, from Virginia to Florida and as far west as Texas. Logging and urban development have shrunk their numbers. Today, slightly more than 5 million acres remain, up from just 3.2 million acres in the early 2000s.

The conservancy has been protecting and restoring longleaf pine ecosystems across the tree’s original range. In Ly’s experience, walking through the Green Swamp is like stepping back in time to a less anthropogenically influenced landscape. Longleaf pine stands are naturally open and were historically maintained by low-intensity natural fires often sparked by lightning strikes.

In the early 1900s, forest management policies changed, ushering in an era of fire suppression. This altered longleaf pine ecosystems and put people and infrastructure in danger of larger, uncontrolled wildfires fueled by newly dense understories.

Now, prescribed fire is once again an important part of longleaf pine management. The conservancy performs controlled burns on regular intervals of three to five years to mimic natural fire regimes.

“Preserving longleaf pine is not just about the tree, it’s about the ecosystem,” Ly explained.

The controlled burns knock back any hardwood trees that have taken root and open the understory, so Venus flytraps, orchids, and other native flora can get the sunlight they need to flourish. These burns are also great for birds and other wildlife that thrive in longleaf ecosystems.

‘An iconic plant’

The conservancy’s website notes the preserve is closed to the public through Aug. 31 as it upgrades the trail, including building a new boardwalk. Don’t let that stop you from planning a trip to visit this fall, though – seeing Venus flytraps in the wild can be a special experience.

“This is such an iconic plant, and there’s just no other place in the world you can see this plant in the wild except here in the Carolinas,” explained botanist and author Scott Zona, who took his first trip to the Green Swamp earlier this year. Zona manages North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox and has an appointment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Herbarium.

Wild Venus flytraps are only found within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington.

Venus flytraps catch their prey using special leaves with sensitive hairs called trigger hairs. Once the hairs sense that an insect has landed on the trap, it snaps shut in less than a second. Any further movement of the prey causes the trap to stay clamped tightly shut as it digests the unlucky passerby. If some nonprey item, like a stick, falls onto the trap, it will slowly open back up for the item to be blown away or fall off.

Venus flytraps also have special reproductive adaptations. While their leaves and stems are low to the ground, their white flowers grow on tall stalks stretching about 8 to 12 inches into the air to keep the insects that pollinate them from becoming lunch.   

Zona’s initial visit to the Green Swamp and seeing Venus flytraps in the wild for the first time did not disappoint: “To me, it’s right up there with the first time I went to the Muir Woods in California and saw redwood trees.”

That may be high praise coming from a man who has traveled around the world studying plant ecology and evolution and has a species of palm named after him.

Zona’s colleagues from the United Kingdom, who visited with him, also enjoyed the experience.

“Both of them are very well-respected, well-known botanists who travel the world, and they were just as excited to see these plants as I was,” he said. 

Myriad other fascinating plants also inhabit the Green Swamp. Its purple pitcher plants lack the umbrella-like leaf “hoods” that other pitcher plants have. The preserve also is home to bladderworts, extremely unassuming plants with tiny sacs used to catch prey. Bladderworts are the fastest carnivorous plants in the world, able to trap and eat their prey in less than a millisecond. And the noncarnivorous plants are worth a close look, as well.

“If you’ve never seen native orchids out in the wild, they’re so beautiful and so unique, they’re much different than the ones you see in the grocery store,” Ly said.

While the area’s nutrient-poor and often waterlogged soil might not sound like a great place to be a plant, according to Zona, those are great conditions for Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants. During the winter they go dormant; in the spring, they revive, unfurling new green leaves. Their diet of insects is an adaptation that helps them make up for the lack of nutrients in the soil.

A 2020 study of the Venus flytrap genome found that the genes associated with flytrap “traps” — the leaves that snap shut on prey — came from copies of genes found in their ancestors’ roots.

The Green Swamp is not only a botanist’s dream, but also a fantastic day trip destination for any nature enthusiast. Zona has just one regret from his trip to the Green Swamp: “We did not have the foresight to pack a lunch with us,” he said. “If we had packed lunch, we could have stayed there even longer.”