Courses and Workshops
Bring Fire Knowledge to Your Community
From prescribed fire to fire behaviour, I deliver hands-on, practical training rooted in real-world experience, right where you need it.
Interested in hosting a course in your area? Let’s make it easy. I take care of the logistics, ordering, and planning, including managing the participant list and coordinating with local partners. Whether you’re a community, agency, or contractor crew, I’ll bring the training to you. Just reach out and we’ll get started.
PAST HOSTS
Cranbrook Fire & Emergency Services
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Williams Lake Fire Dept
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Ktunaxa
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Kelowna Fire Dept
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St'át'imc
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Lil'wat
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Kootenay Boundary Regional Fire Rescue
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BC Wildfire Service
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FNESS
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Cranbrook Fire & Emergency Services • Williams Lake Fire Dept • Ktunaxa • Kelowna Fire Dept • St'át'imc • Lil'wat • Kootenay Boundary Regional Fire Rescue • BC Wildfire Service • FNESS •
Self-Paced Online. RX-310 Introduction to Fire Effects
Learn how fire interacts with ecosystems and how we can monitor, understand, and manage its effects to support resilient landscapes.
Self-Paced Online. S-211 Fire Weather - Prescribed Fire Edition
Online S-211 Fire Weather and Environment - Prescribed Fire Editiion
Self-Paced Online. Ashes to Insights: Fire Ecology in Four Hours
Learn the foundations of fire ecology in under four hours. This fast-paced course covers fire’s role in ecosystems, fire effects, and adaptive management. Perfect for planners, practitioners, pupils and anyone interested in learning the basics of fire ecology.
County of Grande Prairie: S-390 Intermediate Fire Behaviour
Whether you're responding to wildfire, planning prescribed burns, or working in fuels management, understanding fire behaviour is essential for making sound decisions and communicating effectively on the ground.
After eight years of delivering this course with BC Wildfire Service, I’ve redesigned S-390 to better support the diverse realities of today’s fire practitioners, from wildfire suppression to controlled fire and FireSmart initiatives. This updated version bridges the gap between theory and practice, helping you build confidence in using the Red Book, writing burn prescriptions, and applying fire behaviour principles in real-world scenarios.
This is fire behaviour for professionals, taught by someone who works in fire.
County of Grande Prairie: S-219 Firing Operations
This course follows the NWCG standard for S-219 Firing Operations, delivered through a BC lens and customized for your crew, agency, or future projects. Whether you're supporting wildfire response, prescribed burning, or fuels treatment work, this course prepares you to plan and implement ignition operations safely and effectively.
SOLD OUT Kelowna: S-390 Intermediate Fire Behaviour
Whether you're responding to wildfire, planning prescribed burns, or working in fuels management, understanding fire behaviour is essential for making sound decisions and communicating effectively on the ground.
After eight years of delivering this course with BC Wildfire Service, I’ve redesigned S-390 to better support the diverse realities of today’s fire practitioners, from wildfire suppression to controlled fire and FireSmart initiatives. This updated version bridges the gap between theory and practice, helping you build confidence in using the Red Book, writing burn prescriptions, and applying fire behaviour principles in real-world scenarios.
This is fire behaviour for professionals, taught by someone who works in fire.
SOLD OUT Kelowna: S-219 Firing Operations
This course follows the NWCG standard for S-219 Firing Operations, delivered through a BC lens and customized for your crew, agency, or future projects. Whether you're supporting wildfire response, prescribed burning, or fuels treatment work, this course prepares you to plan and implement ignition operations safely and effectively.
Kamloops: S-390 Intermediate Fire Behaviour
Whether you're responding to wildfire, planning prescribed burns, or working in fuels management, understanding fire behaviour is essential for making sound decisions and communicating effectively on the ground.
After eight years of delivering this course with BC Wildfire Service, I’ve redesigned S-390 to better support the diverse realities of today’s fire practitioners, from wildfire suppression to controlled fire and FireSmart initiatives. This updated version bridges the gap between theory and practice, helping you build confidence in using the Red Book, writing burn prescriptions, and applying fire behaviour principles in real-world scenarios.
This is fire behaviour for professionals, taught by someone who works in fire.
Kamloops: S-219 Firing Operations
This course follows the NWCG standard for S-219 Firing Operations, delivered through a BC lens and customized for your crew, agency, or future projects. Whether you're supporting wildfire response, prescribed burning, or fuels treatment work, this course prepares you to plan and implement ignition operations safely and effectively.
Kelowna: S-390 Intermediate Fire Behaviour
Whether you're responding to wildfire, planning prescribed burns, or working in fuels management, understanding fire behaviour is essential for making sound decisions and communicating effectively on the ground.
After eight years of delivering this course with BC Wildfire Service, I’ve redesigned S-390 to better support the diverse realities of today’s fire practitioners, from wildfire suppression and controlled burns to fuels management and FireSmart initiatives. This updated version bridges the gap between theory and practice, helping you build confidence in using the Red Book, writing burn prescriptions, and applying fire behaviour principles in real-world scenarios.
This is fire behaviour for professionals, taught by someone who works in fire.
Kelowna: Prescriptions for Prescribed Fire
Integrated Prescriptions and Burn Planning: Professional Practice Workshop
Prescriptions and burn plans are not independent documents. When they are written in isolation, ecological intent gets lost, burn plans become interpretive, and burn teams are forced to make field decisions without a clear feedback loop to improve future planning.
This three-day professional development workshop focuses on writing prescriptions and burn plans together as a single planning system. Using BC’s current provincial templates, participants learn how objectives, fire behaviour expectations, treatment layout, ignition strategy, and monitoring must align across both documents to support defensible decisions on burn day and meaningful post-burn evaluation.
The course is designed for those starting out and practitioners who already write prescriptions and burn plans, and want them to translate cleanly into operations without reinterpretation. Emphasis is placed on professional judgment, operational feasibility, and documenting fire behaviour logic in a way that supports implementation, review, and adaptive management.
The course is taught by a Registered Professional Forester, AFE Wildland Fire Ecologist, and practicing certified Burn Boss, and reflects how these documents are reviewed, challenged, and used in burn programs.
What You’ll Learn
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
Write prescriptions and burn plans as an integrated planning system that supports burn teams and real-time decision-making on burn day
Write prescriptions so the burn team can write the burn plan without the requirement for a professional signature
Translate objectives into clear fire behaviour logic, treatment layout, and ignition intent across both documents
Design fuel-, fire-behaviour-, and objective-driven stratification and plots that reflect how fire will interact with the site, rather than relying solely on timber-oriented layouts
Apply intermediate fire behaviour knowledge to treatment design, burn timing, ignition strategy, and selection of plots
Build monitoring into prescriptions so outcomes can be evaluated, defended, and adapted over time
Use time, budget, and field effort more effectively
Produce prescriptions that translate cleanly into burn plans and can be implemented by a Burn Boss without reinterpretation
This course builds directly on intermediate fire behaviour concepts (e.g., S-390). It is recommended to complete S-390 or equivalent as you’ll be ready to apply fire behaviour to real-world prescription design. S-390 teaches you how to fuel type, choose fire behaviour indices that make sense for the site and objectives, and write the fire behaviour, weather and desired fire effects pieces of the burn plan.
Three days of field and classroom.
Course will run with a minimum of 14 students.
-
The learning outcomes and exercises in this course overlap with all prescriptions (FMPs, range plans, ecosystem restoration prescriptions, wildland fire prevention prescriptions). The instructor has experience in a variety of non-burn prescriptions and encourages you to bring what you use.
-
This 3-day workshop teaches you how to write fuel management prescriptions that support effective prescribed fire. You’ll learn how to assess fuels, predict fire behaviour, integrate ecological fire effects, and develop prescriptions that align with BC’s 2025 FMP template. It’s practical, field-based, and focused on writing plans that get implemented.
-
A certificate will be given to prove your completion so you can put it towards professional development hours and resume.
-
Registered Forest Professionals
FireSmart and fuel management planners
Prescribed fire practitioners and burn bosses
Indigenous land stewards
Government, NGO, and consulting staff involved in wildfire mitigation or ecosystem restoration
If you’re involved in writing, reviewing, or implementing fuel treatments, this course is for you.
-
This course was designed in response to the Forest Professionals BC (FPBC) scope-of-practice competencies. It helps forest professionals build confidence and competence in planning fire-informed fuel treatments that integrate legal, ecological, and operational requirements. You'll walk away with tools, field experience, and a guidebook tailored to BC’s 2025 FMP template.
-
Yes. You’ll get hands-on experience conducting a reconnaissance field visit, assessing fuels, interpreting fire behaviour, and mapping burn units that align with treatment goals. Field days are practical and collaborative.
-
3 days of instruction (classroom + field)
A professional guidebook on writing fuels management prescriptions for prescribed fire
Digital and printed course materials
Access to additional fire ecology and monitoring resources
-
This course rotates locations throughout BC, typically hosted in communities with active prescribed fire or fuel management programs. Check the course page or contact for upcoming session locations.
-
You’ll receive a full packing list upon registration. You’ll need:
Field gear (boots, weather-appropriate layers, safety glasses, etc.)
Survey tools (the instructor has enough for training but more always helps)
Notebook or tablet for field data
A laptop or notebook for in-class exercises
The Field Guide to the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior (FBP) System aka Red Book
-
Yes. A tailored version of this course can be delivered for your organization, Nation, or agency. Contact to discuss a custom delivery, including private field sessions using your prescriptions or treatment areas.
-
Your instructor, Colleen Ross, is a Wildland Fire Ecologist, Registered Professional Forester (RPF), and Burn Boss with 30 years of hands-on experience in prescribed fire, wildfire operations, and land stewardship. She’s worked across western North America with Indigenous communities, government agencies, and land managers to develop, support and review plans and prescriptions that actually get implemented and burned.
Instructs fire courses including S-390, S-219, RX-310, and S-244
Helped shaped competencies for prescribed fire in BC
Authored operational tools and guides used by practitioners across the province
Designs monitoring frameworks to track long-term fire effects on vegetation, soils, wildlife and fuels
Completed the pilot to this course with excellent reviews and feedback.
She brings deep technical knowledge, ecological insight, and real-world operational experience and is committed to mentoring the next wave of fire-informed professionals.
Kelowna: Fire Effects Monitoring Workshop
Fire effects monitoring is used to examine ecological responses to fire over time and space. It is a critical piece in fire management planning to document the results, measure those results against future treatments, evaluate successes (and failures) and analyze the measurements against ecological, cultural, social and traditional values. Monitoring supports the story you want to share. This course helps you get your monitoring program started as you learn what and how to monitor.
Whitehorse: S-390 Intermediate Fire Behaviour
Whether you're responding to wildfire, planning prescribed burns, or working in fuels management, understanding fire behaviour is essential for making sound decisions and communicating effectively on the ground.
After eight years of delivering this course with BC Wildfire Service, I’ve redesigned S-390 to better support the diverse realities of today’s fire practitioners, from wildfire suppression and controlled burns to fuels management and FireSmart initiatives. This updated version bridges the gap between theory and practice, helping you build confidence in using the Red Book, writing burn prescriptions, and applying fire behaviour principles in real-world scenarios.
This is fire behaviour for professionals, taught by someone who works in fire.
Whitehorse: Prescriptions for Prescribed Fire
Integrated Prescriptions and Burn Planning: Professional Practice Workshop
Prescriptions and burn plans are not independent documents. When they are written in isolation, ecological intent gets lost, burn plans become interpretive, and burn teams are forced to make field decisions without a clear feedback loop to improve future planning.
This three-day professional development workshop focuses on writing prescriptions and burn plans together as a single planning system. Using BC’s current provincial templates, participants learn how objectives, fire behaviour expectations, treatment layout, ignition strategy, and monitoring must align across both documents to support defensible decisions on burn day and meaningful post-burn evaluation.
The course is designed for those starting out and practitioners who already write prescriptions and burn plans, and want them to translate cleanly into operations without reinterpretation. Emphasis is placed on professional judgment, operational feasibility, and documenting fire behaviour logic in a way that supports implementation, review, and adaptive management.
The course is taught by a Registered Professional Forester, AFE Wildland Fire Ecologist, and practicing certified Burn Boss, and reflects how these documents are reviewed, challenged, and used in burn programs.
What You’ll Learn
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
Write prescriptions and burn plans as an integrated planning system that supports burn teams and real-time decision-making on burn day
Write prescriptions so the burn team can write the burn plan without the requirement for a professional signature
Translate objectives into clear fire behaviour logic, treatment layout, and ignition intent across both documents
Design fuel-, fire-behaviour-, and objective-driven stratification and plots that reflect how fire will interact with the site, rather than relying solely on timber-oriented layouts
Apply intermediate fire behaviour knowledge to treatment design, burn timing, ignition strategy, and selection of plots
Build monitoring into prescriptions so outcomes can be evaluated, defended, and adapted over time
Use time, budget, and field effort more effectively
Produce prescriptions that translate cleanly into burn plans and can be implemented by a Burn Boss without reinterpretation
This course builds directly on intermediate fire behaviour concepts (e.g., S-390). It is recommended to complete S-390 or equivalent as you’ll be ready to apply fire behaviour to real-world prescription design. S-390 teaches you how to fuel type, choose fire behaviour indices that make sense for the site and objectives, and write the fire behaviour, weather and desired fire effects pieces of the burn plan.
Three days of field and classroom. Course will run with a minimum of 14 students.
-
The learning outcomes and exercises in this course overlap with other non-burn prescriptions (range plans, ecosystem restoration prescriptions, wildland fire prevention prescriptions). The instructor has experience in a variety of non-burn prescriptions and encourages you to bring what you use.
-
This 3-day workshop teaches you how to write fuel management prescriptions that support effective prescribed fire. You’ll learn how to assess fuels, predict fire behaviour, integrate ecological fire effects, and develop prescriptions that align with BC’s 2025 FMP template. It’s practical, field-based, and focused on writing plans that get implemented.
-
A certificate will be given to prove your completion so you can put it towards professional development hours and resume.
-
Registered Forest Professionals
FireSmart and fuel management planners
Prescribed fire practitioners and burn bosses
Indigenous land stewards
Government, NGO, and consulting staff involved in wildfire mitigation or ecosystem restoration
If you’re involved in writing, reviewing, or implementing fuel treatments, this course is for you.
-
This course was designed in response to the Forest Professionals BC (FPBC) scope-of-practice competencies. It helps forest professionals build confidence and competence in planning fire-informed fuel treatments that integrate legal, ecological, and operational requirements. You'll walk away with tools, field experience, and a guidebook tailored to BC’s 2025 FMP template.
-
Yes. You’ll get hands-on experience conducting a reconnaissance field visit, assessing fuels, interpreting fire behaviour, and mapping burn units that align with treatment goals. Field days are practical and collaborative.
-
3 days of instruction (classroom + field)
A professional guidebook on writing fuels management prescriptions for prescribed fire
Digital and printed course materials
Access to additional fire ecology and monitoring resources
-
This course rotates locations throughout BC, typically hosted in communities with active prescribed fire or fuel management programs. Check the course page or contact for upcoming session locations.
-
You’ll receive a full packing list upon registration. You’ll need:
Field gear (boots, weather-appropriate layers, safety glasses, etc.)
Survey tools (the instructor has enough for training but more always helps)
Notebook or tablet for field data
A laptop or notebook for in-class exercises
The Field Guide to the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior (FBP) System aka Red Book
-
Yes. A tailored version of this course can be delivered for your organization, Nation, or agency. Contact to discuss a custom delivery, including private field sessions using your prescriptions or treatment areas.
-
Your instructor, Colleen Ross, is a Wildland Fire Ecologist, Registered Professional Forester (RPF), and Burn Boss with 30 years of hands-on experience in prescribed fire, wildfire operations, and land stewardship. She’s worked across western North America with Indigenous communities, government agencies, and land managers to develop, support and review plans and prescriptions that actually get implemented and burned.
Instructs fire courses including S-390, S-219, RX-310, and S-244
Helped shaped competencies for prescribed fire in BC
Authored operational tools and guides used by practitioners across the province
Designs monitoring frameworks to track long-term fire effects on vegetation, soils, wildlife and fuels
Completed the pilot to this course with excellent reviews and feedback.
She brings deep technical knowledge, ecological insight, and real-world operational experience and is committed to mentoring the next wave of fire-informed professionals.
Whitehorse: Fire Effects Monitoring Workshop
Fire effects monitoring is used to examine ecological responses to fire over time and space. It is a critical piece in fire management planning to document the results, measure those results against future treatments, evaluate successes (and failures) and analyze the measurements against ecological, cultural, social and traditional values. Monitoring supports the story you want to share. This course helps you get your monitoring program started as you learn what and how to monitor.
Whitehorse: S-219 Firing Operations
This course follows the NWCG standard for S-219 Firing Operations, delivered through a Canadian lens and customized for your crew, agency, or future projects. Whether you're supporting wildfire response, prescribed burning, or fuels treatment work, this course prepares you to plan and implement ignition operations safely and effectively.