Continued disregard for fire as an ecological process has left humans and forests more vulnerable to increasingly extensive, high-severity fires. Prescribed burns from the urban interface outward to our diverse forests call for thoroughly understanding how fires behaved in the past under different climates and how they’re likely to behave now as climate and population pressures increase.

This course will include interactive discussions of fire behavior with regard to historical frequency, intensity, duration, and extent. The course will look at evidence of change since the turn of the century and project what might be expected with climate change. Focusing on particular conifer species, the course will compare them and look at how they’ll behave with future climatic extremes. On course field trips, some of the oldest and newest fires in the area will be visited to evaluate how fire has changed structure composition and landscape function.

Tuition for this course is $100.