Hi I'm John Enz and I'm a researcher from Jacksonville University I have been
doing gopher tortoise research here on Cumberland Island for four years now.
If you're not familiar with gopher tortoises they are a threatened species
they are endangered in fact in some areas of the range so anytime we can
provide better habitat for the gopher tortoises, it's going to be not only
good for the species itself, there's over 300 different species that use these
gopher tortoise burrows for their home as well. When we reintroduce fire to the
ecosystem it really creates the more natural habitat that the gopher
tortoises have historically lived in. And typically when we reintroduced
prescribed burns to an area we do have to have multiple years and multiple
burns to see a huge effect on the gopher tortoise population however even after
the first burn in February of 2016 the following year we did see a large
recruitment of tortoises into this area of Stafford Woods. Pre-burn because of
the dense vegetation and thick woody plants we only found five burrows in
this area but even after just one prescribed burn we had recruitment of
15 burrows into this area. We also saw increase in the tortoise population as a whole.
What we're attempting to do is what wildlife managers have done
throughout the southeast for decades using prescribed fire to manage habitat.
So by introducing fire to this habitat in general in a fairly constant and
closed regime saying every two to three year cycle where we would introduce
prescribed fire here we're able to remove a lot of that mid-story and
the understory vegetation and hopefully convert it to more of a grassy
herbaceous vegetation that is more attractive to the gopher tortoises that
we've already talked about and also a host of different wildlife species
reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, everything really benefits in
this particular pine habitat where you can actually manage your understory
mid-story with fire. Where the historical records that have shown a considerable
amount of longleaf pine which depends almost wholly on fire adapted ecosystems
so that's, that means it depends on fire to survive. So what we've seen on Cumberland
is decades if not a century or more of a lack of significant fire on this
particular island. Okay one of the things that routine prescribed fire will do for
a habitat in the species that uses is it will expose things that have been
covered up a large layer of leaf litter. Speaking of how pines are fire,
fire adapted these are pine cones. So just a little burn like this may allow
the seeds relevant to these cones to actually take sprout. It exposes a lot of
things like acorns and seeds of herbaceous plants for things like
songbirds Eastern wild turkeys. This island does have a pretty decent
population of Eastern wild turkey. So they will be able to pick up seeds that
have been here that they may not have seen before
They'll also scratch the leaf litter like that looking for more seeds if they
do find a couple of seats in an area so it is definitely beneficial for exposing
the food source and also allowing allowing things to sprout
that would not otherwise sprout.
The first fire, prescribed fire that happened here was
in February of 2016 and we just burned about a week ago in February 2019 so
this area seemed to prescribed fire treatments in the past 3 years.
We had multiple objectives with both field and the plantation. You know we
want to do our fuels reduction so that in the case of a wildfire we have more
options as far as suppressing the fire that's the route we want to take.
Another objective here was to reduce the woody encroachment on this field. We're trying
to maintain a historic landscape out here in this field and as you can see
looking around here you have live oaks coming in here you have
some slash pine trying to work its way in here as well and as we burn as we
burn in here repeatedly we're able to reduce the encroachment and maintain
this as an open grassy field which we want to do to maintain historic
character and also it gives us a more diverse landscape out here
which benefits wildlife habitat as well.
We also saw with the combination of the burning of the field as well as the woods here
increase in the tortoise population as a whole, better survivability of juveniles
and also sub adults. So we're really looking forward to continuing this
program to open up even more areas for the Gopher tortoise population to thrive.