Tall Timbers and Prescribed Fire in Tallahassee, Florida

Forests around Tallahassee are burned on purpose because Florida's pine lands evolved with lightning fire, and planned burns both keep that habitat open and clear the fuel that feeds extreme wildfires.

For the Tallahassee region, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission explains that naturally occurring fires caused by lightning once played a major role in forming and maintaining much of Florida's pine lands, sandhills, scrub, prairies and wetlands. FWC names the red-cockaded woodpecker, fox squirrel, gopher tortoise, indigo snake and Florida scrub-jay among the rare, fire-adapted animals and plants that cannot thrive without fire, and calls prescribed burning one of its most extensively applied habitat management practices.

The second reason is fuel. The National Forests in Florida, whose supervisor's office is at 325 John Knox Road in Tallahassee, describes prescribed fire as a planned fire that reduces hazardous fuels and protects communities from extreme fires, and states that more prescribed fires mean fewer extreme wildfires. The Forest Service's history of the Florida forests says the Apalachicola National Forest, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, is the state's largest forest at 567,742 acres, the national forest land closest to the Tallahassee supervisor's office.

Burning is routine across the state, including Leon County. The Florida Forest Service says it oversees one of the most active prescribed fire programs in the country and, in an average year, issues approximately 88,000 authorizations allowing landowners and agencies to burn over 2.1 million acres. Burning in Florida is governed by Chapter 590, Florida Statutes, and Chapter 5I-2, Florida Administrative Code, and the Forest Service advises Leon County and Tallahassee landowners, like all others, to check local rules and their local Florida Forest Service office as well.

Tall Timbers is a research station and land conservancy at 13093 Henry Beadel Drive in Tallahassee that describes itself as the home of the study of fire ecology.

On its About page, Tall Timbers says it is recognized as the home of the study of fire ecology, is an advocate to protect the right to use prescribed fire for land management, and is also recognized as one of the nation's leading land trusts. Its stated mission is to foster exemplary land stewardship through research, conservation and education. The station credits Herbert L. Stoddard and his associates Ed and Roy Komarek as pioneers of fire science in the Tallahassee Red Hills during the mid-20th century, and says the region's pine woodlands, once dominated by longleaf pine, need prescribed fire to stay healthy.

The station grew out of one landowner's plantation. A February 2013 Tall Timbers eNews item reports that The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation, a history of Tall Timbers by Robert L. Crawford and William R. Brueckheimer, won the Silver Medal in the Florida Book Awards Visual Arts category for 2012. The newsletter says the book traces benefactor Henry Beadel from sportsman and naturalist to conservationist and follows the plantation's transformation into what its founders envisioned, a long-term research station independent of government or academic funding and control. Those are Tall Timbers' own descriptions of its history, attributed to it here.

Tall Timbers research in the Tallahassee Red Hills, based on plots burned on schedule for decades, shows that frequent prescribed fire sustains open pine woodland.

The Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Program lists a 2021 Journal of Forestry paper titled Frequent prescribed fire sustains old field loblolly pine and shortleaf pine woodland communities, results of a 53-year study. The same publication list includes a 2021 Restoration Ecology paper on transplanted wiregrass tussocks, the results of a 37-year study, a 2019 paper finding that patchy fires promote regeneration of longleaf pine in pine savannas, and a 2023 paper on how the season of fire affects bee and flower interactions in a fire-maintained pine savanna.

The work also reaches outside the Red Hills. Through its Wildland Fire Science Program, Tall Timbers hosts the Southern Fire Exchange, which it calls the premier fire technology transfer organization, connecting research to management through webinars and workshops. Tall Timbers also says that through the Prescribed Fire Science Consortium, the station, the US Forest Service and researchers from across the country are working on predicting fire behavior from ignition patterns, the smoke transport that results, and fire effects, using LiDAR, infrared imagery and GIS.

The Red Hills quail plantations of the Tallahassee region kept burning through decades of fire suppression, and Tall Timbers credits that culture of fire for its own role in fire science.

Tall Timbers' About page says private landowners are the largest source of prescribed fire in the country, and that the culture of fire they maintained during decades of suppression is part of why Tall Timbers is a worldwide center for prescribed fire science. It reports that the Greater Red Hills region contains the largest concentration of gamebird preserves in the United States and that these preserves support the largest community of red-cockaded woodpeckers on private lands. According to Tall Timbers, the conserved working properties of the Greater Red Hills contribute $272 million annually to local economies and support 2,300 jobs; those are the conservancy's own figures.

The same Tall Timbers page lists large disappearing sinkhole lakes, Iamonia, Miccosukee and Jackson, and river systems such as the Ochlockonee that flow from Georgia toward the Gulf. Fire now reaches the lakes too. The Lake Jackson Aquatic Preserve, a 5,130-acre Leon County preserve established in 1973 and managed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, lists among its program highlights the implementation of prescribed burning with state agencies and private landowners to restore lake bottom habitats, manage vegetation and enhance biodiversity in Lake Jackson.

Agencies around Tallahassee run each burn from a written plan, light it only when the day's weather matches that plan, and get a Florida Forest Service authorization first.

The National Forests in Florida, headquartered in Tallahassee, says its specialists write burn plans that consider temperature, humidity, wind, the moisture of the vegetation and conditions for smoke dispersal, and compare conditions on the ground to the plan before deciding whether to burn on a given day. FWC describes the same discipline: planning for a burn starts months in advance, and each burn unit has a written prescription that describes the burn area, preferred weather, personnel and equipment needs and emergency contacts. When the weather is right, FWC obtains a burn authorization from the Florida Forest Service before lighting, the same step a Leon County landowner takes.

The lighting varies with the ground, which in the Tallahassee region runs from Red Hills uplands to the wet flatwoods of the national forest. FWC says small units are lit with hand-held drip torches, larger or less accessible ones with ATV or truck-mounted torches, wetter areas with torches mounted on swamp buggies and airboats, and the largest units by aerial ignition from a helicopter. Season matters as much as method: according to FWC, spring and summer burns usually increase grasses and other non-woody plants, while fall and winter burns favor shrubs such as palmetto and gallberry. FWC gives example burn intervals of every 18 months to four years for pine flatwoods and every 18 months to three years for sandhill.

A Tallahassee landowner becomes a certified burner by completing the Florida Forest Service's Certified Prescribed Burn Manager course, which costs $175 in either the distance learning or the classroom format.

The Florida Forest Service certification page says certified burners, because of their additional training, are allowed to burn when others cannot, may burn longer through the day, and receive liability protection as long as they follow the law. The web-based correspondence course is open year-round to burners who have direct experience in three or more acreage burns. The classroom course is open to all experience levels, and the nearest scheduled session to Tallahassee is at the Bear Creek Education Center in Havana. The Forest Service notes that its schedule can change.

As of October 18, 2026, the registration deadlines for the Havana, Bryceville and Milton sessions had already passed, so a new Tallahassee applicant would look to the January 2027 classes or the year-round distance course. For a first burn without certification, the Florida Forest Service prescribed fire page points landowners to its Steps to Getting an Authorization guide and the local Florida Forest Service office, and lists its prescribed fire program office at 3125 Conner Blvd. in Tallahassee.

The Tallahassee public learns about prescribed fire mainly through the WhyPrescribedFire.org campaign and the yearly Red Hills Fire Festival at Tall Timbers.

Tall Timbers says WhyPrescribedFire.org was originally built through a four-year public-private partnership between Tall Timbers and the Florida Forest Service that included targeted paid advertising from 2020 through 2023. In spring 2025 the campaign expanded into the Albany, Georgia region with video and radio ads, and Tall Timbers, which owns and operates the site, said data from those ads would shape recommendations for another round of ads in spring 2026.

The festival is the hands-on side. A Fall 2016 Tall Timbers eNews item announced the first Red Hills Fire Festival for Sunday, January 22, 2017, as a free collaboration among organizations in Florida and Georgia with live prescribed fire, equipment demonstrations, wagon ride tours, fire talks, food vendors and live music. The Lake Jackson Aquatic Preserve reported that it took part in the Tall Timbers Red Hills Fire and Nature Festival on February 7, 2026, where visitors learned about the benefits of prescribed fire for native wildlife and watched a live burn demonstration. A 2027 date had not been posted on the Tall Timbers page checked.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against current pages from the Florida Forest Service (prescribed fire and burner certification), FWC, the National Forests in Florida, the Lake Jackson Aquatic Preserve and Tall Timbers' own program pages.