The flames move across the grass, low and steady as they back into the wind, leaving the ground behind charred.

As the sky blackens, the smell of smoke fills the air and a crackling sound carries as the flames roll and the forage ignites, fueling the fire.

Trucks and side-by-sides drive along the perimeter, monitoring the fire's behavior.

“Fire is a good servant,” said Garren Bastin, an Oklahoma State University natural resource ecology and management master’s student. “But, it is a bad master.”

What unfolds here is not spontaneous; it is prescribed. Before lighting the first patch, conditions must align.

“You can’t have a grassland without fire,” said John Weir, OSU senior Extension fire ecology specialist. “Fire creates and maintains grasslands.”

Restoring fire to the grasslands takes careful preparation and prescribed conditions, he said.

A relative humidity of 30% to 70%, with consistent wind speeds and direction are needed, and fire breaks are to be laid months in advance, Weir said, adding flames move forward only when all conditions are met.

In a state that recently witnessed how quickly fire can escalate under extreme weather conditions, those guidelines are not random, Weir said. They are the difference between deliberate ignition and uncontrolled spread, he added.

Fire shaped Oklahoma long before it was managed. Fires naturally occurred every two to four years, maintaining grasslands and limiting the encroachment of woody species like eastern red cedar, Weir said.

In fire’s absence, fuel loads accumulate and the encroachment of woody species increases.

Eastern red cedar, a native juniper species known as ERC, expanded beyond historic boundaries in the absence of frequent fire throughout the Great Plains.

The encroachment of ERC altered the landscape and increased volatile fuels throughout the Great Plains, Weir added.

Prescribed burns reintroduce what was once a natural occurrence under selected conditions.

“When you remove fire, the system changes,” Weir said, “You get a larger amount of woody volatile fuels, and it changes the fire.”

Recurring prescribed fire alters the landscape’s structure. Frequent burns reduce the accumulation of leaf litter, prevent woody species from reaching difficult-to-manage heights and limit dense understory growth, he said. Fire resets the system in regular intervals, he added.

Beyond reducing fuel loads, prescribed burns improve forage for livestock and support wildlife habitats. In patch-burn systems, fire is rotated, encouraging livestock to move with it, Bastin said.

“For livestock, it gives them freshly burned areas to consume,” Bastin said, “It moves the livestock around through that area without the need for fencing.”

In the last century, fire has been framed almost exclusively as a threat, Bastin said. Public messaging has emphasized suppression, reinforcing to the public that all fire is destructive, he added.

Prescribed burns challenge that assumption. Suppressing fire doesn’t remove it from the landscape. It alters how it returns, Weir said.

“The question isn’t if it burns, it’s when,” Weir said, “The difference is whether we choose the conditions.”

Fire behaves differently under extreme conditions, he added.

On March 14, 2025, Stillwater faced extreme fire conditions.

Relative humidity dropped to 10%, and average wind speeds were 18.8 mph, with gusts reaching 61.8 mph, said Olivia Prichard, forest ecology and management master’s student and graduate research assistant.

Within a 12-hour period, the Stillwater Fire Department received nearly 300 calls for service. This volume is more than they would receive in 30 days, according to the Stillwater Fire Department.

Additionally, crews faced fire calls at a volume equivalent to eight years’ worth in a single day.

There were more than 26,300 acres burned, 98 homes lost and another 123 homes impacted. Eleven county fire departments and two task forces assisted the community in southwest Stillwater, according to KOCO News.

Despite the scale of the destruction, no lives were lost, and no major injuries were sustained.

Crews continued to fight hot spots and flare-ups until March 19, 2025.

Events like this show how quick-fire behavior can escalate under extreme weather conditions, Weir said.  For land managers and researchers alike, understanding these patterns and behaviors informs long-term decisions about fuel management and prescribed burning for a resilient landscape in the future, he added.

Soon after the wildfires, attention began to shift from containment to understanding, Prichard said.

The wildfire burned through OSU’s Cross Timbers Experimental Range, and researchers found themselves with a unique opportunity to learn from this disaster, Prichard added.

Prichard said she had originally planned to study prescribed fire for her master’s thesis.

Instead, the wildfires in March 2025 transformed her project into a real-time study on wildfire behavior and recovery.

Unlike many wildfire locations, the CTER came with nearly a decade of pre-fire data, Prichard said. Researchers individually documented 2,800 trees across the experimental range, Prichard added.

“Since the fire burned through an active research site,” Prichard said, “We know exactly what was there.”

Long-term data allows the researchers to compare the conditions before and after the fire at a fine scale, Prichard added.

During summer 2025, researchers returned to the CTER to measure char heights and document resprouting across the plots. As researchers analyzed the scar left by the wildfires, they compared four watersheds with different ratios of oak woodlands to ERC.

To quantify the severity of the wildfire, the team used the Composite Burn Index, a standardized scale of 0 to 3 that measures how fire affects vegetation from the canopy to the forest floor.

The watersheds dominated by cedars recorded the highest severity with a CBI of 2.95 and nearly 99% tree mortality, Prichard said. The oak woodland registered a moderately high severity of 2.05 and 38% tree mortality, she added.

Other watersheds with 50% to 70% ERC encroachment fell in the moderate severity score range, with a CBI of around 1.63, Prichard said.

While cedar-dominated forests experienced the highest tree mortality, the relationship between species composition and severity is more complex. High-severity fire was still possible in predominantly oak woodlands under extreme conditions, Prichard said.

The findings suggest density and long-term management may influence how landscapes respond when extreme conditions arise.

Prescribed burning is not about eliminating fire. It is about meeting it on chosen conditions and using planned flames to lessen the impact of the unplanned, Weir said.

Story by Taylor Groat | Cowboy Journal