Hey d, you may be aware of some of my crustier views on "prairie restoration" from elsewhere on GW, but truth be told, I am involved in a great deal of prairie maintenance, including burns. We contract much of our maint. work out and to a very good firm I might add. FWIW-and this could be a regional specificity-spring is when the vast majority of prairie burns take place for us here in the north. One of our goals with these burns is to inhibit cool-season grasses, many of which are non-native, and therefore on our bad list.
It's always a balancing act between getting conditions suitable for these burns, not having valuable native forbs coming up yet (nearly impossible, I'm afraid) and hopefully having a good stand of the cool-season junk present to get nipped by the flames.

I'd be interested in hearing your-or anyone's really-account of what objectives are met by fall burning. And to be complete, some fall burning can and does take place up here. I've never requested it personally in our system but I came close this year, with a big "flood storage area" that is exhibiting poor plant community make-up at present. We've since come up with another plan, so no fall burn there-otherwise we'd have done so.

If you have the time, would you lay out your objectives with a fall burn? I know woody "invaders"-a highly nuanced term in my book!-are likely one of your targets. anything else at this time of year?

Thanks, +oM

Woodies and grass forb/debris. I had a lot of native winter/spring growers (like a couple of terrestial orchids, caroline larkspur, etc)...the best time I could burn was ASAP in fall.
In Oklahoma, we don't have much cool season grass.

Makes sense, and is in fact pretty much what I'd expected. In a recent conference, those of us up here were advised to take a re-look at cool-season species, at least those few which are native, with a view towards rethinking this process. Subtext reads-in this part of the world, "cool-season" is actually most of the season. As I've often noted here and elsewhere, "prairie" is a bit of a misnomer for what happened up here, with occasional disturbances to wooded land giving rise to a meadow seral stage, but certainly that was never an endpoint. Kind of a reworking of the philosophy to better recognize just where we are! Non-native cool-season grasses have worked their way into every nook and cranny, so much so that of all plant species, one of the, if not the most common encountered in wetland delineations is....get ready for it....Kentucky bluegrass!

+oM