By the time most kids were learning to ride bikes on sidewalks, Paige Butler was learning to read the land. Growing up in Kerrville, Texas, her weekends weren’t spent at the mall or the movies. Instead, she hiked trails lined with live oaks, cedar elms and pecan trees, worked alongside her parents to restore native grasses on their family’s 100 acres, and sat quietly in deer blinds as the sun came up over the Hill Country.
That upbringing didn’t just shape her childhood — it shaped her future. Today, Butler is a master’s student in Texas A&M’s Department of Geography, where she’s studying the historic vegetation and fire patterns of the Edwards Plateau in Central Texas. Her research, which combines 19th-century handwritten land surveys with modern mapping technology, is giving Texans a clearer picture of what the Hill Country once looked like — and what it could be again.
As an undergraduate at Texas A&M, Butler completed a Bachelor of Science degree in environmental studies, an interdisciplinary program in the College of Arts and Sciences that gives students an understanding of the Earth’s surface processes and environmental problems, along with the policy and decision-making components of human interactions with the environment. She also earned minors in climate change and Spanish, graduating in May 2023.
“I came into college already passionate about conservation,” Butler said. “But it wasn’t until I took biogeography with Dr. Charles Lafon that I realized I wanted to focus on fire and vegetation history.”
That spark of interest turned into a thesis project requiring patience, persistence and a bit of detective work. Butler combed through thousands of Texas General Land Office survey records, many of them hard to read and over a century old. She transcribed more than 4,000 individual data points from those surveys into ArcGIS, a digital mapping system, to create a reconstruction of Hill Country vegetation from the time of European settlement.
Those early records, often noting “witness trees” used to mark land boundaries, reveal a landscape very different from the cedar-choked hillsides of today. Butler’s work shows where historic grasslands and fire-dependent ecosystems once thrived before modern fire suppression policies changed the balance.
Her findings have real-world implications. In Kerrville, recent floods along the Guadalupe River wiped out entire riparian forests, leaving residents to wonder what “restoration” should look like. Butler hopes her research will serve as a guide.
“My goal is to give clear direction on the historic distribution of vegetation,” she said. “If we know what once existed, we can make smarter choices about how to restore it.”
The project is also deeply personal. Growing up, Butler watched community debates over cedar clearing and fire reintroduction. Now she’s providing evidence that could inform those discussions for years to come.
Her journey through graduate school has been marked by more than research. She praises the Texas A&M Geography Department’s wide range of seminars and courses, which introduced her to fields far beyond her own.
“It’s easy to get stuck in your own world of research,” she said. “But this program pushes you to keep an open mind and see multiple perspectives.”
Still, a few experiences rose above the rest. She credits Dr. Lafon’s Pattern and Process in Biogeography course with changing her trajectory. Even during the challenging spring after COVID-19, when the 8 a.m. lectures were optional, Butler never missed a class.
“He’d put up a photo of a landscape with no words and just talk about the ecological systems at work,” she recalled. “I found it fascinating.”
Looking ahead, Butler hopes to keep working with fire in conservation. She has already joined prescribed burns with the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, witnessing firsthand how landscapes respond to fire. She envisions a career in which she helps restore fire-dependent ecosystems across Texas and beyond.
For now, she’s still rooted in the Hill Country, carrying forward the lessons her parents began teaching her on their property nearly two decades ago: listen to the land, respect its history and care for its future.