The United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Services Agency has awarded Texas State University a grant to study the impact Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands have on wildfire risk in the central United States.
Christopher Serenari, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Biology, will serve as principal investigator for the four-year, $1.15 million grant. Xiangping Liu, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Sciences, and Heath Starns, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Serenari’s lab, and Tori Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor of forest management at the University of Florida, are also involved in the project.
Although CRP lands have tremendous potential to protect watersheds, provide habitat, conserve soil and enhance air quality, the buildup of vegetation and the potential for wildfires is a major concern of some landowners and politicians. Thus far, there is a lack of research to determine how fire management affects landowners’ future decisions to enroll or persist in CRP, whether CRP lands contribute to wildfire occurrence and how they could be integrated into attempts to build fire resilient agricultural landscapes.
The TXST study will conduct fire risk modeling for CRP lands across 13 states, from the Mexican to Canadian borders. Researchers will survey current CRP participants to model how they make decisions about fire management while also testing the influence of three popular policy instruments on fire management decisions using hypothetical fire management scenarios.
The study is expected to help close critical knowledge gaps concerning wildfire risk on CRP and adjacent lands and advance theoretical insights. Once gathered and analyzed, this deeper understanding should help policymakers avoid political miscalculation by identifying how the USDA can optimize management and arrangement of CRP lands to enhance the fire resilience of agricultural landscapes throughout the Great Plains—and the communities dependent upon them—while simultaneously contributing to the accumulating social-environmental benefits generated by CRP since its inception. The research team’s dissemination of findings, along with outreach and engagement plans, are designed to represent and resonate with the diverse array of Great Plains landowners, enabling USDA-FSA to highlight CRP lands in the national discourse on fire resilience involving private lands.