Next to Empire Grade Road near UC Santa Cruz, firefighters touch their torches to the dried grass, causing flames to fan out across the field. The burn engulfs shrubs and saplings that grow amongst the grass, while the fast-moving fire leaves taller trees unscathed.

This prescribed burn was one of many lit near the California coast this fall. It aims to keep the grassland free of trees and shrubs, maintaining the coastal prairie, one of California’s most overlooked ecosystems.

Rolling hills of grass and wildflowers once blanketed swaths of the state’s western edge. Periodic fires set by Native Americans maintained these open fields, since grasses spring back faster from fire than trees and shrubs.

But when European colonization extinguished these blazes, the balance shifted, and dense forests began overtaking the grasslands. Today, only about 10% of native coastal prairies remain.

This change has had serious consequences, since healthy prairies provide little fuel for wildfires, have high biodiversity, and are full of tender plants that cattle and deer love. But with tribal and fuel reduction burns on the rise throughout the region, land managers are increasingly using these fires to rejuvenate grasslands.

“Fire can create a clean slate that temporarily reduces competition and creates light,” says Georgia Vasey, a graduate student at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Coastal Climate Resilience. Her research centers on reviving coastal prairies, which can be complicated. Restoring a grassland is not as simple as removing the trees.

“What often comes back is invasive grasses,” says Lathrop Leonard, a forester for California State Parks who does a lot of prescribed burns on coastal prairies. “And while it’s still a success that we got it back, the grasses, it’s not as good as it could be.”

With coastal prairies in a centuries-long decline, many of their constituent plants are endangered. Nonnative plants from Europe and Asia often take over. This is a problem, Vasey says. “In California coastal prairies there are maybe 300 native plant species. But now when you look at nonnative grassland you might see just 10 species.”

A native prairie is “a mosaic of bunch grasses that are interspersed with all these little flowers,” Vasey says. Alternatively, Leonard says that many nonnative grasses are sod-forming. They spread via underground stems that choke out everything else.

Vasey is working to restore these native prairies, starting with the wildflowers. She plants their seeds in pockets of prairie right after a burn and is waiting to see if they multiply over time.

“When you think of super blooms in the spring,” she says. “You’re thinking of these vast spreads of wildflowers. That’s what I’m trying to restore.”

Vasey holds community workshops with researchers, ranchers and land managers to better understand how fire impacts local grasslands. They are creating a coastal prairie fire guide that shows what to expect after a burn.

But after centuries of efforts to protect California’s forests, “we’ve had a fair amount of backlash at some of our coastal prairie restoration projects because people are concerned that we’re murdering trees,” says Sarah Vroom, executive director of the Mattole Restoration Council. She believes that there has been so much emphasis on protecting forests while prairies have been overlooked.

“I once heard someone say: ‘there’s a Save the Redwoods League, where’s the Save the Grasslands League?’” Vroom adds that there is a California Native Grasslands Association, which gets less attention.

“I want Californians to look at the hills and say ‘those should be open, beautiful grasslands or oak savannas,’” she says. They should “understand the reality of how much forest has encroached into grasslands.”