Our objectives are to 1) determine temporally explicit impacts of cogongrass, woody plants and vines, and their interaction on fire behavior, 2) develop new fuel models that incorporate impacts of…

The University of Florida received a $572,315 Cooperative Agreement from the Bureau of Land Management's Joint Fire Science Program (CFDA 15.232) awarded September 15, 2025, with completion targeted for September 30, 2028. This project will develop temporally explicit fire behavior models that account for invasive species impacts, specifically cogongrass, woody plants, and vines across Southern ecosystems. The research will generate updated fuel models incorporating invasive species effects and deliver an enhanced Southern Wildfire Risk Explorer tool that quantifies wildfire risk associated with invasive species presence and treatment interventions. The project hypothesizes that cogongrass will increase fire intensity metrics while woody invasive plants will reduce fire behavior impacts, with combined fuels exhibiting cogongrass-dominated characteristics.

Mississippi State University serves as a sub-awardee (awarded December 4, 2025), providing project oversight and field support at the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. Mississippi State's responsibilities include coordinating prescribed fire timing, conducting herbicide applications, assisting with prescribed burns, collecting field data, and providing a technician to support project activities across Florida and Mississippi locations. The cooperative arrangement leverages both institutions' research capabilities to produce science deliverables and decision-support tools that enhance wildland fire management decision-making for federal, state, and private land managers in fire-prone Southern regions.

Our objectives are to 1) determine temporally explicit impacts of cogongrass, woody plants and vines, and their interaction on fire behavior, 2) develop new fuel models that incorporate impacts of invasive species, 3) use these fuel models in concert with available location data for invasive species, and social and environmental data to update the southern wildfire risk explorer to include risk associated with invasive species and show a change in risk associated with invasive species treatment. We hypothesize that 1) cogongrass alone will increase fireline intensity, flame length, rate of spread, and burn probability but the magnitude of these impacts will depend on the fuel moisture conditions of cogongrass, which will be variable through time and across environmental conditions, 2) woody plants and vines alone will reduce fire behavior metrics because they have less flammable litter structure and enhanced moisture content and can reduce the availability of flammable native fuels and 3) fire behavior of fuels comprised of cogongrass and woody invasive plants together will be similar to that of cogongrass alone as its impact to the fuelbed will override that of woody invasive plants.