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Oakland Township plans prescribed burns in local parks Residents invited to join Volunteer Fire Crew training Feb. 20 Advertisement It may seem like Oakland Township officials are playing with fire this spring, but according to township Natural Areas Stewardship Manager Ben VanderWeide, the upcoming park blazes are quite intentional. To help restore balance to the township’s natural areas, the township has been regularly burning its parklands since 2002. Those first burns, according to VanderWeide, were in prairie remnants on parks or trailway property along the Paint Creek Trail. “A lot of our plant communities developed with fire, to the extent that a lot of them are fire dependent, so if we don’t burn regularly, we are actually going to lose that plant community and a lot of the special plants and animals that go along with it. That includes a lot of the pollinators that have been declining quite drastically in the last couple of decades,” VanderWeide explained.