Members of the Fort McCoy prescribed burn team coordinated several prescribed burns in March 2024 at Fort McCoy as conditions allowed.
The post prescribed burn team includes personnel with the Fort McCoy Directorate of Public Works (DPW) Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch (NRB); Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security; the Colorado State University Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands who partner with DPW, and a few other various garrison personnel.
All prescribed burns began in the morning and went for several hours and were mainly concentrated in range areas where future training is planned.
In November 2023, during another prescribed burn, Fort McCoy DPW NRB Chief Tim Wilder discussed how a prescribed burn helped improve a training area on South Post of Fort McCoy.
“We’re accomplishing several different things here with this burn today,” Wilder said Nov. 13, 2023. “The burn is going to help maintain this area as a prairie. … This area is an extension of the Badger Drop Zone for Soldiers to either drop equipment or when they are parachuting out. On the natural resources side, we have several rare butterflies at the installation, … and they’re all found in that Badger Drop Zone. We should be improving that habitat for them today.”
Prescribed burns also improve wildlife habitat, control invasive plant species, restore and maintain native plant communities, and reduce wildfire potential. Prescribed burns benefit the environment many ways and are one of the tools we can use on a large scale to improve our wild habitat, said Fort McCoy Forester Charles Mentzel in previous news articles about prescribed burns. Mentzel has spent decades managing burns on post.
Mentzel said prescribed burns help set back invasive species, and they burn up their seed banks.
Burns also give native species an opportunity to compete against some of the non-native species, as many native species depend on fire to help stimulate them and set back non-native species.
“One of the other big benefits of prescribed burns is invasive species management,” Wilder said. “We’ll target areas to help with invasive species management.”
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources also gave the following information describing the benefits of prescribed burns for wild areas.
“Some specific advantages of prescribed burns include stimulating prairie grass growth and improve habitat for upland game and waterfowl; creating pockets of open water for waterfowl amidst cattails proliferating in low areas; stimulating the growth of wildflowers, which attract insects — a vital food sources for young game and non-game grassland birds; and improving cover type for grassland nesting birds such as pheasants.”
Prescribed burns also “spur native vegetative growth for songbirds; and creates open pockets of bare ground, increasing diversity and richness of ground foraging, seed-eating small mammals and birds.
As the prescribed burn season continued into the spring, Fort McCoy leadership stated the post will continue performing prescribed burn operations where local conditions provide a safe and effective burn. Fort McCoy will also continue to carefully assess the most appropriate days to conduct prescribed burns.
Located in the heart of the upper Midwest, Fort McCoy is the only U.S. Army installation in Wisconsin. Fort McCoy’s motto is to be the “Total Force Training Center.”
The installation has provided support and facilities for the field and classroom training of more than 100,000 military personnel from all services nearly every year since 1984.
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