Fire is a Moment. Monitoring Tells the Whole Story.
This hands-on workshop gives you the tools, techniques, and confidence to measure what fire actually does to the land over time. Whether you are working in forestry, restoration, prescribed fire, or wildfire risk reduction, understanding long-term fire effects is essential to planning better burns and proving success.
You will learn how to design permanent plots, collect repeatable data, and interpret changes in fuels, vegetation, and soils that emerge months and years after a burn. Built around real-world examples and grounded in professional practice, this course will help you connect fire behaviour with outcomes, and use that knowledge to improve your next land management or burn plan.
What You’ll Learn
Through guided field-based discussion and practical exercises:
Design a long-term monitoring plan that complements your land management goals and regulatory needs.
Select the right protocol (e.g., frequency, density, cover) based on your objectives and ecosystem type.
Set up and practice using permanent plots to track fire effects over time.
Differentiate first- and second-order fire effects and link them to fire behaviour and burn severity.
Write better objectives for your values and fire that align with cultural, ecological, or operational values.
Use your monitoring results to inform adaptive management and support future decision-making.
Format
This workshop is often delivered between May and October to align with burn and monitoring seasons. It can be customized for your team, ecosystem type, or program needs.
Duration: Two-day field-based session or blended delivery with optional third day to learn prescription and burn plan design incorporating pre fire effects monitoring results.
Suitable for: Prescribed fire practitioners, restoration ecologists, wildfire professionals, cultural fire leads, land managers and resource professionals.
Overlaps your current monitoring (e.g., wildlife monitoring, bird point count, cruise plots) with protocols from the Fire Monitoring Handbook, Fuels Characteristic Classification System and Composite Burn Index (LiDAR mapping).
Prerequisites: None. RX-310 Introduction to Fire Effects complements the theories covered in the course with more detail (the why).