What Happened to the FIU Nature Preserve?!

Blog By: Grace McLeod
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If you’ve taken a walk through the FIU nature preserve recently, you may have noticed, it looks a little different.

The core of the preserve is an endangered pine rockland ecosystem. These forests used to cover what is now the Miami urban area. Today, only a few small patches remain, making it one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world. But just protecting these remnant patches from further development isn’t enough; in order to keep them healthy, they need to burn!

Pine rocklands are what we call a fire-dependent ecosystem. This means that they depend on regular disturbance by fire to maintain their biodiversity, structure, and ecological function. In the prolonged absence of fire, the upwards of 15 endemic plants found in these forests begin to be outcompeted by less fire-adapted species. In as little as 15-20 years without fire, the forest will transition to an entirely different ecosystem.

But as you can imagine, wildfires are not very common in the middle of FIU’s campus, so FIU’s Office of University Sustainability, FIU Police, and FIU’s Environmental Health & Safety paired up with the Florida Forest Service to conduct a controlled burn. Controlled burns are fires that are intentionally set to either reduce fuel available for dangerous wildfires, or in this case, provide the necessary disturbance to support biodiversity in fire-dependent ecosystems. On Friday March 2^nd 2023, the nature preserve had its third ever controlled burn (Figure 1)!

Walking through the preserve now, just weeks later, you will already notice fresh green grass and palm leaves emerging from the ashes (Figure 2).

 

Figure 1: FIU nature preserve just hours after the controlled burn on March 2^nd 2023. Photo by Grace McLeod.

Figure 2: FIU nature preserve on May 9^th 2023, two months after the controlled burn. Photo by Grace McLeod.