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 you’ll be able to:
Explain the purpose of fire monitoring and describe different monitoring levels.
Identify first- and second-order fire effects in the field.
Develop clear monitoring objectives that support burn plan goals.
Select and apply appropriate monitoring protocols for vegetation, fuels (and treatments), and other values for the site conditions.
Lay out plots and collect accurate field data using standard tools and forms.
Use results to evaluate outcomes and improve future burn planning.
Format
This workshop is often delivered between May and October to align with burn and monitoring seasons and identify plants. It can be customized for your team, ecosystem type, or program needs. You provide the ground, I’ll take care of the rest.
Duration: Three days. One day classroom and two field-based session.
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: Recommend RX-310 Introduction to Fire Effects which complements the theories covered in the course with more detail (the why).
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Monitoring isn't optional, it's foundational to adaptive management. It validates whether fuelling and burn prescriptions achieved their ecological and operational goals, and it informs future actions by tracking trends in vegetation, fuel consumption, fire effects, etc. It’s built into every responsible prescription and burn plan.
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You'll learn to design monitoring programs using proven system, such as the Fire Monitoring Handbook, FCCS/FNESS Cultural FEMO, and Composite Burn Index, in alignment with your burn unit and objectives.
The workshop walks you through selecting indicators, sampling design, data collection and analysis, and linking results directly back to prescriptions and burn plans.
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Many prescriptions stop at treatment design but omit measurable goals and protocols. That’s a missed opportunity. Training ensures your projects include outcome-based prescriptions with quantifiable objectives and a post-treatment monitoring plan, making your work not just defensible but meaningful.
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While you’re encouraged to build custom monitoring protocols, your design should align with accepted frameworks (e.g. National Park Service Fire Monitoring Handbook) to ensure rigor and comparability. We’ll explore how to adapt level‑based standards to meet your ecological, cultural, and community goals.
I’ve developed a protocol that uses the most popular methods that can be overlaid with other data collection (e.g., fuels, silviculture, wildlife, vegetation).
These protocols are currently being used by Ministry of Forests (district, BCWS, BCTS), FNESS, BC Parks, and muncipalities and Indigenous communiites I work with.
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By systematically evaluating burn outcomes, such as burn severity, fuel reduction, vegetation response, you can refine future prescriptions and burn plans. Over time, monitoring data helps you assess program-level trends, identify successes or gaps, and adjust prescriptions and timing accordingly.
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Yes. Clear monitoring plans with documented outcomes build credibility with funders, regulators, Indigenous partners, agencies, and the public. Providing evidence of ecological and cultural benefits supports shared stewardship and long‑term acceptance.
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Hosts have included: Ministry of Forests, BC Wildfire Service, BC Timber Sales, Xwisten, Lil’wat, Ktunaxa, FNESS, CABIN.
Participants have included: resource professionals, consultants, burn bosses, students, wildlife biologists, ecologists, entomologists, resource managers, wildfire risk reduction speciliast and guardians.
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The course is $680 including all the forms and a manual to keep, and tools to use during our time together.