Monitoring Report Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Gorman, KellyAnn

The area consists of four fields for a total of 50 acres. Three fields were burned on March 13 and the remaining field, Landrum House Field, was burned today. The purpose of maintaining the fields as fields is so that park visitors can get a feeling for the battlefield as it was during the Civil War and to promote the growth of native tall grasses and reduce nonnative invasive plants in order to promote habitat for native wildlife. In the past fields were bush-hogged by park maintenance one to two times a year. The purpose of burning is to use fire to retard the growth of woody species in order to open up and maintain fields and vistas so that park maintenance will no longer need to use time, equipment, and fuel to maintain these open fields. The area to be burned is located in the Spotsylvania Courthouse Unit of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The unit is partially surrounded by blacktop road and mixed hardwood forest and is best represented by fuel models 1 and 3. The vegetation consists of warm season native grasses, cool season exotic grasses, and patches of shrub/scrub, mostly oak, up to four feet tall. At the time of this burn, the dogwoods had been out for three days, the mixed hardwood forest surrounding the unit was at 10-20% of green-up, 5% of the buds on oak brush in the field were opening, and about 50% of the shortest grasses were green, and woodcocks were peenting (mating) three weeks ago.