Tools and Trainings
Please visit the UI website for details about dates and timing.
The University of Idaho (UI) offers a variety of online fire and natural resources courses with Great Basin content. These courses and degree programs can help you develop as a professional and succeed in fire and natural resources management. View the list of online courses or certificate and degree programs. Consider taking one or more online courses, a certificate or enroll in a degree program. This is a great option as many professionals are place-bound, face limits on travel budgets, and are challenged to effectively accomplish science-based management on the ground to address pressing needs for management and conservation in Great Basin ecosystems and beyond.
The Fire Ecology, Management and Technology Certificate and the Master of Natural Resources (MNR) degree can be completed entirely online — without ever coming to campus, and at in-state tuition rates for all.
As many professionals are place-bound and face limits on travel, these online training options can help practitioners accomplish science-based management on the ground to address land management challenges in the Great Basin and beyond.
Questions? Contact [email protected]
FireWorks is an educational program about the science of wildland fire, designed for students in grades K-12. Educator workshops are offered each year to teach educators, community leaders, and agency communicators how to use FireWorks. Two research projects have shown that FireWorks increases student and adult understanding of wildland fire.
FireWorks provides students with interactive, hands-on materials to study wildland fire. It is highly interdisciplinary and students learn about properties of matter, chemical and physical processes, ecosystem fluctuations and cycles, habitat and survival, and human interactions with ecosystems. Students using FireWorks ask questions, gather information, analyze and interpret it, and communicate their discoveries.
Visit Colorado State University (CSU) course overview
The online Graduate Certificate in Communications for Conservation at Colorado State University offers conservation practitioners and communicators a holistic program for learning ideas, skills, and tools to communicate and engage with a wide range of public stakeholders, including media and communications specialists, decision-makers and thought leaders, other scientists, and everyday citizens.
The Hot-Dry-Windy Index (HDW) was designed to help users determine which days are more likely to have adverse atmospheric conditions that make it more difficult to manage a wildland fire. It combines weather data from the surface and low levels of the atmosphere into a first-look product.
HDW was designed to be very simple – a multiplication of the maximum wind speed and maximum vapor pressure deficit (VPD) in the lowest 50 or so millibars in the atmosphere. Because HDW is affected by heat, moisture, and wind, seasonal and regional variability can be found when comparing HDW values from different locations and times.
The dataset provides a spatially explicit estimate of 2019 herbaceous annual percent cover predicted on May 1st with an emphasis on annual grasses. The estimate is based on the mean output of two regression-tree models. For one model, we include, as an independent variable amongst other independent variables, a dataset that is the mean of 17-years of annual herbaceous percent cover.
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Find research briefs, tools, and more on specific topics in natural resource sciences and management related to climate change
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ALERTWildfire is a consortium of three universities — The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the University of Oregon (UO) — providing access to state-of-the-art Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) fire cameras and associated tools to help firefighters and first responders: (1) discover/locate/confirm fire ignition, (2) quickly scale fire resources up or down appropriately, (3) monitor fire behavior through containment, (4) during firestorms, help evacuations through enhanced situational awareness, and (5) ensure contained fires are monitored appropriately through their demise.
Visit Cal Fire wildfire preparedness website.
Many resources are available on preparing and preventing wildfire and living and coping after wildfire.
The Exploration Tool is designed for resource managers to use when planning land treatments. The tool provides useful summaries of environmental characteristics of planned treatment areas and facilitates adaptive management practices by comparing those characteristics to other similar treatments within a specified distance or area of interest.
EPA researchers initiated a citizen science project called Smoke Sense. This project has two broad objectives. The first to increase awareness of the known health effects associated with exposure to wildfire smoke. The second is to further advance the scientific understanding of that relationship, specifically to:
- Understand the subclinical health impacts of wildland fire smoke
- Discover how people protect their health during smoke exposure
- Develop effective strategies to communicate health risks from smoke exposure
Individuals who want to contribute to science can participate in the study by using the Smoke Sense app, a publicly available mobile application on the Google Play Store and the App Store.