Some Herbage Responses to Fire on Pine-Wiregrass Range

Abstract

Protecting two sites on pine-wiregrass range from fire caused a rapid reduction in herbage yields. Reintroducing fire on these sites resulted in significantly increased yields, but removal of old growth by hand clipping instead of burning caused a decrease in yield on the site with Olustee sand and an increase in yield on the site with Plummer sand. Although gallberry cover did not recover as rapidly after burning on the Olustee site as on the Plummer site, covariance analysis indicated that these differences in recovery did not fully account for the disparity in yield between burned and clipped plots on the two sites.