•Catastrophic wildfires in Texas, from the 2011 Bastrop Complex Fire to the 2024 Panhandle megafires, have accelerated a fundamental shift in public attitudes, demonstrating that proactive prescribed burning is not optional but essential for protecting communities, rural economies, and fire-adapted ecosystems.•A growing network of Prescribed Burn Associations and the Prescribed Burn Alliance of Texas is rebuilding fire culture through neighbor-to-neighbor training, equipment sharing, and legislative advocacy, but uneven geographic coverage, liability concerns, insurance gaps, and limited access to cost-share funding still prevent many landowners from burning as often or as broadly as ecological conditions warrant.•Expanded educational pathways, including AgriLife Extension’s online Prescribed Burn School, the Certified and Insured Prescribed Burn Manager credentialing program, and new interagency coordinator positions, have substantially lowered the barriers to entry for aspiring practitioners, yet an aging practitioner workforce and a shrinking pipeline of new candidates for Certified and Insured Prescribed Burn Managers represent the most consequential long-term threat to Texas’s prescribed fire culture.•Sustaining Texas’s prescribed fire revival requires a deliberate next-generation strategy: structured mentorship programs, municipally embedded wildland fire coordinators modeled on Borger’s success, expanded Texas Department of Transportation right-of-way burning partnerships, and continued federal farm bill advocacy, all that are concrete steps that will determine whether the gains of the past decade outlast the practitioners who achieved them.
•The relative productivity index (RPI) compares observed vegetation productivity with the potential productivity of healthy, undegraded rangelands, estimated from climate, soils, and topography using a machine learning model. This provides a dynamic, data-driven baseline against which vegetation condition can be assessed.•We present an improved RPI version that convincingly outperforms a widely used alternative method (i.e., residual trends analysis) in distinguishing local management impacts from background climate variability in East African rangelands. This improves confidence that detected trends reflect land condition rather than short-term climatic variation.•RPI does not replace ground monitoring but can reveal underlying changes in vegetation condition that are otherwise masked by rainfall and temperature fluctuations. Case studies help clarify how RPI outputs should be interpreted alongside field indicators.•RPI shows limited sensitivity to invasive Neltuma (Prosopis) shrubs, highlighting both the robustness of the metric and the importance of interpreting satellite-based assessments alongside local ecological knowledge.•Because RPI dynamically estimates expected productivity for given climatic and soil conditions, the resulting standardized metric enables direct comparison of rangeland condition across regions and through time, supporting more consistent large-scale monitoring and evaluation of land management.
