I deal with the effects from lack of fire quite often. Fire is what created much of the landscape in that area whether its marsh, prairie, or longleaf pine and when you take that out its like taking a turtle or a crawfish out of water, yeah it will survive but it will not thrive. Fire helps to keep woody brush under control and after a few years of not burning, fire is not as effective. If the marsh in Lacassine was burned right now it would do very little, it would just come back up green in a few weeks. You then need to get it back to where it was previously which is where herbicides come into play. It is so much easier to maintain an area than it is to restore an area. Restoration is expensive, the costs of herbicides and the manpower to implement them is expensive, and when the vegetation is very thick, it takes two or even three herbicide jobs to get to it all. You have to let the veg die back and then spray what you missed or what the herbicide could not get down into. On paper, it is very simple to restore something, you go in and do A, B, C, and D and then just maintain after that, but the time scale between A to the maintenance stage may be 5 or even 10 years.
All our NWRs and WMAs could use some funding, but I don't see that happening in this economy unless we do like Missouri and add a little sales tax statewide to go towards conservation on our state lands, but asking Louisiana people to raise taxes
. Seems like 'stimulus' funds could have been used for the SW La refuges complex back in 2009 but that is a totally different subject
