By Justin Walker
Communications Specialist
The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service has developed a prescribed burning handbook as the range management tool continues to gain popularity.
The handbook, funded by the Texas A&M Natural Resource Institute, contains up-to-the-minute information from professional prescribed fire practitioners from across the state.
“Professional prescribed fire practitioners in Texas are very good at what they do,” Dr. Morgan Russell, AgriLife Extension range specialist at San Angelo and a major contributor to the project, told AgriLife Today. “AgriLife personnel realized there wasn’t a consolidated hub for information specifically for the prescribed fire practitioner and set about to meet that need.”
The Texas Prescribed Burning Handbook can be accessed two ways—online and through a smartphone app.
The handbook can be found online at https://agrilife.org/rxburn/.
“The website information offers a central platform for all practitioners, whether they are in a prescribed burn association, are a private burn manager licensed through the Texas Department of Agriculture or are someone just wanting to learn more about prescribed burning,” Russell said. “Information there includes relative humidity charts, probability of ignition, potential fire spread, potential fire prescriptions and example fire prescriptions to use to achieve certain objectives.”
The mobile app—RxBurn—is free.
“Download that app, and you’ll be able to pull up all the graphs and all the tables available on the website and figure out any type of fire weather conditions or situations you need to achieve,” Russell said.
Information on both platforms are updated to provide the most current information.