Fires Center Campus

The US Army Corps of Engineers commissioned this planning study to guide stewardship of a 9,000 acre area in southwestern Oklahoma including noteworthy cultural landscapes and large managed natural areas. The resulting landscape guidelines balance ecological services with historic preservation and offer tangible measures for making visible the landscape imprint left by marginalized groups in the history of the fort: The former slave who successfully engineered an anti-malarial drainage system, the indigenous peoples who for millennia occupied and managed (with fire) the landscapes of the Lower Plains as a vast hunting park. The guidelines prescribe a particular plant mix for each of four unique microclimates found in the study area. These range from a desert plant community at the north end of the cantonment in the Wichita Mountain formation to shortgrass prairies on the dry-mesic uplands to a more diverse stratified woodland in the moist bottomlands that follow the local meandering stream valleys.

2021 Recipient MD-OK ASLA Merit Awards