Looking at Akagera National Park, with its beautiful fluorescent green landscapes and animals grazing peacefully on the land, it may not be easy to understand exactly what is needed to preserve and maintain this environment.

All across Africa, terrestrial native environments can be divided into two main types of habitats, forests and savannas.

 Gaël R. Vandeweghe 

These habitats are sometimes intertwined, and one will see riverine and dry forests in a savanna, or patches of grasses within an extensive forest.

What usually allows for a more accurate segregation between the two is the percentage in grass cover. Savannas, however thick or wooded, are identified by their high percentage of grass cover while forests usually have very low amounts.

Like all habitats, savannas are dynamic, and will change and evolve over long periods of time. In Rwanda, Akagera National Park once faced a very serious challenge of poaching that reduced the density of animals grazing in the park.

Habitats—particularly in the south—went from grasslands to thick and closed thorn bush, quite unsuitable for not only grazing animals but also for the rebuilding of their communities.

One of the solutions to a situation like this comes in the form of controlled fires in specific areas of the park to clear away the unfriendly vegetation and allow for fresh grass to grow back for the grazing animals.

While unregulated fires can become uncontrollable especially in late August and September—threatening to burn the entire park, and resulting in human casualties—regulated fires overseen by Park management serve to facilitate growth of the grasses animals need to graze.

It is generally well known that savannas, particularly in Africa have burnt since very ancient times and the habitats we see today are well adapted to sustain these fires.

In savannas, fires will burn regularly and will control the vegetation. With grasses being the primary fuel, fires tend to burn fast and cover large areas quickly, only burning the dry materials during dry seasons.

Early fires, occurring at the early stages of the dry season usually only affect dry grasses, while late fires, also called hot burns, will have a more severe impact, including a reduction in tree and scrub density.

In fact, this phenomenon is so ancient, that many of the savannas species of plants, insects, birds and even mammals have adapted and respond positively to fires.

Many seeds will only germinate after their hard, protective, layer has been touched by fires. In some cases germination only happens after the start of deep chemical mechanism triggered by the temperature of the flames.

In other cases it is the flowering process that comes straight after all has been burned. Fires usually displace animals of all size; in fact birds will follow most fires in large numbers and will catch all sorts of insect fleeing from the flames.

Antelopes and most mammals usually jump over the fires where the flames are low, while others will hide in their holes underground and other types of hideouts .

As natural environments and savannas are increasingly enclosed within boundaries of national parks and reserves, fire management becomes an essential tool to mitigate some of the negative impacts of finite spaces.

Early burns (June-July) are preferred over late hot burns (August-September) that would enflame quickly and leave very large areas devoid of any food for grazing animals for two weeks to a month.

With their limited movements, this could be devastating and cause high mortality levels. There was a time where animals in southern Akagera National Park would simply walk through the Gisaka to the plateau of the Migongo region and around what is Ngoma today, but that is no longer possible.

The same situation was in the northern and central part of the park, where animals would seasonally migrate to the Mutara region as far as Nyagatare. All these movements were following seasonal patterns of fire and rains.

Today, at the beginning of the dry season, fires in Akagera are managed with large patches burning at different times. This allows for constant sources of grazing grasses, variations of grazing areas to avoid overgrazing on small burnt patches and a few late hot burns to control and maintain a certain vegetation type.

The writer is a social commentator based in Kigali.

The views expressed in this article are of the author.