It’s common now to see smoke in the air around Northern Arizona in the fall. Prescribed burns have become the norm for managing forests—especially around Flagstaff, which is a national model for forest management in an age of megafires. But nationwide, there’s a shortage of people qualified to do those burns, and funding is limited. The Nature Conservancy is trying to fill that gap by offering training for future “Burn Bosses.”
Rebecca Dykes works for the Los Padres National Forest in California. She has a lot of experience putting out fires, but not so much with starting them. "Which is really exciting," she says. "This is actually my first time burning in grasslands."
Dykes came to Arizona for the Workshop on Ecological Burning, or WEB, held this year at Hart Prairie Preserve north of Flagstaff. She wants to take what she learns here back to her forest in California.