Controlled burn of prairie land near Nassau Community College planned

When clouds of smoke rise around Nassau Community College in Uniondale on Tuesday morning, there is no need to call the fire department. It will be there already, according to the nonprofit Friends of Hempstead Plains, which has organized a prescribed burn of the prairie land on the southeastern edge of campus.

“It's important to do this because we want to get rid of any unwanted fuels on the ground, any bushes and shrubbery that can cause an uncontrolled fire,” said Nina Shah-Giannaris, a board member of the organization and a civil engineering professor at the college. “It helps reduce the density of those invasive species that take over and kills the plants that we want, the native plants that we want to grow.”

The organization hired a New Jersey-based company to perform the burn on 9 acres of the 19-acre prairie. In 2023, the nonprofit organized a 4-acre burn on the site and planned to do another last year, but weather didn’t cooperate, Shah-Giannaris said.

The preserve is used to teach students at the college, and trails snake through the prairie grass so people can walk through it, she said. One feature of the land is the presence of sandplain gerardia, a pink flower thought by some to be rare, that Shah-Giannaris said has come back stronger since the 2023 burn.

Jerod DeLay, assistant state forester and fire management officer in Wyoming, where prairies can stretch farther than the eye can see, said the burning off of dead organic material helps bring out “lusher, more vibrant grasses.”

“Water and the nutrients get right into the soil,” DeLay said. “The nutrients and everything can have an easier pathway right into the soil.” 

A controlled burn is “an easier way, a quicker way to put that carbon back into the ground instead of the natural decomposition of the grasses,” DeLay said.

The public is welcome to come and watch the burn, which should begin at 8:30 a.m. and end by noon, Shah-Giannaris said.

Before it was developed, the Hempstead Plains were 40,000 acres, according to Friends of Hempstead Plains.

“This is the last 19 acres,” Shah-Giannaris said. “This is the largest piece of what's left, so we really want to maintain and keep it.”