The University of Texas at Austin (UT) is looking to start from zero with one of its research facilities in the Hill Country.
Austin NBC affiliate KXAN reported that the school lost centuries worth of data to a blaze that consumed the Stengl Lost Pines Biological Field Station in Smithville last month. The field station is located at least 40 miles southeast of the UT campus.
Site manager Steven Gibson told KXAN that the wildfire ate up about 800 acres, 350 of which was used by the university, from Aug. 11-14.
“We’re starting from bare Earth in hard-burned areas like this,” Gibson said, surmising a recovery that could take years, per the station.
KXAN reported that UT researchers have gathered data at the field station for almost 30 years.
UT assistant professor Dr. Brian Sedio said in the report that facilities like Stengl serve as a control for experiments and research.
“Field stations allow us to create a baseline of, of ecological data through long-term monitoring,” Sedio told KXAN.
Gibson compared field stations to libraries.
“The library, per se, is the building with the walls and the doors and the windows,” he said, according to the station. “But that doesn’t have a lot of value, the value (is) the books inside. This data, this research that’s been collected, those are the books inside the library.”
Gibson added that a “hard reset” has to be performed on the research.
“We have to remap all of our different sub habitats,” he told KXAN.
But there appears to be a silver lining.
“The forest going forward, it’ll be a mosaic of different forest types that have experienced different histories and different disturbances,” Sedio said, the station reported.
UT’s webpage on Stengl describes it as “akin to having a piece of the ‘Piney Woods’ of East Texas” just outside the state capital.
The field station bears the name of Dr. Lorraine Idell “Casey” Stengl, who monetarily gifted UT’s College of Natural Sciences to make it possible for students to conduct high-level research, the university said.