The dry weather is looking like it will play a factor in a Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) and University of Saskatchewan (U of S) research project taking place at a conservation area in southwestern Saskatchewan.

A small part of Old Man on His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area (OMB) was scheduled to undergo part two of a series of prescribed burns this fall, but the planned blaze seems unlikely now due to the conditions.

Matthew Braun, manager of conservation science and planning for the NCC - Saskatchewan region, said the researchers expected weather may put a damper on some of the spring and fall burns that were tentatively planned over the next three years.

"The plan that we had laid out for the area requires certain moisture and wind conditions to be met and from my understanding from my reading of the weather station data were not there," he explained. "That's the nature of this kind of conservation work it doesn't always work when it's scheduled because the weather conditions are the ultimate dictator of whether we can go or not."

Even though the burns probably won't happen this fall time, the NCC and U of S were able to carry out the first set of prescribed burns in late April of this year on the land.

"We have a particular set of parameters, basically we're not allowed to burn when it's too windy or too dry," Braun said. "The conditions were only right in the early morning and close to the evening when the winds would calm down and the humidity would come up. We followed those conditions which really limited the amount of burning we could do because it's often quite windy and dry down there, so we're limited to when we could do it and followed the conditions and the advice of the people that were working with us there and it was a successful burn."

The burn (overseen by the Frontier Fire Department) scorched about 30 acres (there are 13,000 acres at OMB site) and is a part of the five-year research focused on better understanding how to influence where cattle and bison graze at the site, and how fire as a natural disturbance, changes the plant community.

"It's hard to imagine that a group that's trying to conserve nature would deliberately burn something," Braun stated. "When you start going into what some of those plants and animals need, the conditions that they need, the combination of fire and grazing are in some ways it's the only way to accomplish that, some of those very specific conditions, so it does seem odd but there is some pretty deliberate thinking behind it."

Later this winter the researchers will start to dive into their finding on how the spring burn went, but Braun noted the area they burnt was showing positive signs already.

"The most obvious result of the burn is that area was green faster than the rest of it because all the dead material was removed, it warmed up a bit quicker, it tended to resprout much more quickly than the adjacent grass," he said. "Some of the changes like the quality of feed that's been growing back there, that stuff will be available probably this winter."