California's New Certified Burn Boss Certification Travel Grant

View the project final report

Commodities

Practices

• Animal Production: rangeland/pasture management
• Education and Training: participatory research, technical assistance
• Natural Resources/Environment: wildlife
• Pest Management: flame, weed ecology
• Sustainable Communities: urban/rural integration

Prescribed fire is well recognized as a cost-effective and uniquely beneficial land management tool, with utility for range management, ecological restoration, fuels reduction, wildlife habitat enhancement, and more. In California, most prescribed burn has historically happened on federal lands, and private lands burning was largely planned and overseen by CAL FIRE through their Vegetation Management Program (VMP). After decades of decline, the VMP is now expanding, and CAL FIRE has made major investments to meet their statewide prescribed fire goals. Nonetheless, this state program alone cannot meet the demand from landowners. This landowner demand has created a training need for private prescribed fire practitioners to meet CAL FIRE requirements to lead community-based burns on private lands under shared liability with CAL FIRE to reduce this bottleneck (as required by SB1260). California Senate Bill 1260 recently mandated CAL FIRE to create a state certified burner program by 2020, but the main limitation is that only graduates of the first state certified burn boss course can teach subsequent courses, creating an immediate bottleneck in the availability of the course. For this project, we proposed providing travel scholarships for professionals within CAL FIRE, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Cooperative Extension, agriculturalists, and other organizations that work extensively with prescribed fire to attend week-long California State Certified Burn Boss training to become certified burners/educators for the state and empower them as leaders and educators of the state certified burner courses. This grant was modeled after PDP travel scholarships to conferences where key Certified Burn Boss educators and class organizers could obtain travel support to host these courses across the state. 

The challenge in our work as extension professionals is to nurture the next generation of great prescribed fire practitioners, using a fine balance of inspiration, training, and regulation to get where we need to go. This certified burner program is a huge opportunity to change the norm in California, but there are bottlenecks that must be widened to make change beyond lofty agency goals. Through this Enhanced State PDP Project, we increased capacity for resource management-driven prescribed fire on private lands in California. Specifically, we:

• We worked in collaboration with collaborators across the state to (CAL FIRE, NRCS, Cooperative Extension, California Deer Association, California Cattlemen’s Association, and especially the California Prescribed Burn Association), develop a list of current prescribed fire practitioners that have the interest and drive to be community leaders/educators in their regions that we wanted to target as educators and attendees to the second generation of Certified Burn Boss courses in California in 2022.
• We recruited a cadre from the first California certified burn boss graduation list to lead the second state certified burner classes (with the list of strategically identified individuals aforementioned from partner agencies/groups) in partnership with the principal investigators. Cadre members had expertise in fuels management, incident command centers, fire behavior, and have familiarity with programs and policies that enable prescribed fire on private lands.
• Provided opportunities for travel funds to individuals (exclusively offered to unpaid, volunteer instructors), either from the first or second graduating class, to serve as instructors for more locally-coordinated efforts across the state to create a third cohort of certified burners.

This project served as a pilot to explore future opportunities and models of seed funding for trainings across the state for the certified burn boss program. Since these limited funds were matched with volunteer time of highly qualified trainers and educators, we are hopeful that it can serve as an example to CAL FIRE that we can get a lot of training to the prescribed burners of California with little cost, hopefully stimulating a small annual budget to continue this work.