Bachelot sees new opportunities amongst fire’s destruction of research site
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | egosney@okstate.edu
When wildfires began to tear through the Stillwater region on March 14, Oklahoma State University’s Dr. Benedicte Bachelot wasn’t thinking about her research at the McPherson Botanical Preserve eight miles west of campus.
“It was only when I got home safely with my kids on the east side of town that I realized that my site was on fire,” said Bachelot, explaining that a weather tower on the preserve recorded extreme temperatures before transmissions stopped, indicating it had likely burned. “After notifying the right people, I stopped thinking about it since there was nothing to be done. [I then] tried to help colleagues and friends that were in the evacuation zone.”
The Monday following the fires, Bachelot visited her research site at McPherson Preserve, 180 acres of land managed by the Department of Plant Biology, Ecology and Evolution whereon OSU faculty and students conduct field studies. Her site had, as she suspected, been destroyed by the fires.
“Honestly, I am very lucky. My experiment burned down, but that’s nothing compared to what many OSU and Stillwater families have lost,” Bachelot said. “My research is all about how environmental changes influence the biotic interactions that structure plant communities. This fire just added a new direction to my on-going research.”
Shortly after coming to OSU, Bachelot set up long-term experiments at McPherson as a part of BugNet, an international network of research plots. Her group collected baseline data in 2021 and started a four-year research plan in 2022 to specifically investigate how insects, fungi, mollusks and mycorrhizal fungi shape the McPherson Preserve’s tallgrass prairie.
“The preserve needs to be actively managed with fire to maintain the prairie, so this was good for the preserve — and only for the preserve,” Bachelot said, referencing the wider community devastation. “The timing of the fire was bad for my research, however, because I needed one more year ... to collect a lot of important data to be able to assess the impacts of our four years of treatment.
“I am still planning on collecting as much as I can, but the interpretation of the data will be much harder because it will not be a simple biotic interaction story, but a biotic interaction plus fire story.”
Bachelot pointed out that because the fire burned so quickly through the prairie, she was able to locate the damaged — but still present — plot markers in order to reset the experiment. Another silver lining, she said, is the whole new opportunity the fire’s impact presents.
“I have three years of pre-fire biotic interaction experiments which, following the fire, opens new questions for my lab group to investigate,” Bachelot said. “I just need to pivot a little, look for additional funding opportunities and rethink the summer field campaign.”