Few things are more satisfying than learning how to use a dichotomous key and run a prescribed burn. On a drizzly day in late March, eighteen lucky middle-schoolers from Laytonville got to do both.

The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC) has teamed up with the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center (HREC) to teach fire-science and wildfire-safety basics to about 800 students from 16 schools across the county this spring. The program is free to students, parents and schools, with MCFSC covering all the costs of materials and transportation.

*Students working on their scientific method to test fire behavior*

The field trip is the second in a curriculum of three lessons, explained Emily Lord, a GrizzlyCorps Fellow working for MCFSCl. The first lesson is a classroom session on fire ecology and the history of fire in California. “We use trauma-informed educational practices to talk to kids about fire,” she said, adding with a laugh that “part of that is getting them excited about lighting things on fire when they come here.”

The second lesson is a field trip that includes a very controlled burn, with matchsticks representing trees, cotton balls standing in for vegetation, and volunteer trainers who nudge things along with scientific queries and safety tips. The kids also go for a hike in the woods to learn how to identify native species, and how they are adapted to wildfire.

For the third lesson, Lord continued, “We go back to the classroom and talk about wildfire preparedness and resilience.” They assess their school campus for potential fire-safety improvements, and vote on what items they should pack in a go-bag in case they have to evacuate.

The students were enthusiastic about identifying a California buckeye tree. Its mossy trunks wandered out of a nest of big stones, shaded by its palmately compound leaves. “It looks really hairy,” one student scientist observed. “Like a hairy leg,” agreed GrizzlyCorps Fellow Maggie Swanson. “I love what I’m hearing, and I’m ready to use the dichotomous key - what about you?”

The key is a no-tech, choose-your-own-adventure identification tool that directs users to questions, based on answers to previous questions, about the organism they are trying to ID. Does the tree have compound leaves, divided into leaflets? If yes, go to step 2. The buckeye’s leaves are called palmate because each leaf has five leaflets, or fingers, radiating out from a center that resembles a palm, if you use a bit of imagination.

Students also worked through a prescribed-burn protocol under the tutelage of Mike Jones, a UC Cooperative Extension Forestry Advisor for Mendocino, Lake and Sonoma Counties, and retired CAL FIRE forester Lynn Webb. Students learned the fundamentals of fire behavior, and then applied them by crafting a hypothesis about how three sets of matchstick “forests” would burn under different conditions. Arrangements of cotton balls represented different densities of vegetation, a key variable in wildfire behavior. The students then lit their miniature “forests” and determined which variables had the most significant impact on their fires. They measured the flames and recorded details as Webb and Jones pressed them with questions: “How would you describe the burn pattern that happened here? How did the wind affect your prediction? Did you see what happened with the vegetation? What is your data?”

Sixth-grade teacher Joni Kirvin was thrilled to see her students using real science. “It was so relevant,” she said. “We’ve been studying how California is a fire ecology, and the scientific method… It was just a perfect integration to let them use the scientific method and fire science. They were fully engaged, which is always magic.”

*Grizzly Corps Fellow Emily Lord delivers fire science curriculum*

Hannah Bird, HREC’s community education specialist, shares Kirvin’s enthusiasm for applied science. She played an active role in developing the curriculum that is now available to middle-schoolers in Mendocino County. About five years ago, she worked with fire scientist Kate Wilkin to adapt a program called FireWorks, which was developed by the US Forest Service in the 1970s. “It’s been tweaked every year since then,” she said, “because our fire story is changing every year. And the conversations we’re having with students change every year because of other fires that may have happened nearby.”

Bird thinks this year’s model is the best yet. “We’ve been focusing this curriculum on middle-schoolers for a few reasons,” she said. One is the rigor of the material. “But we also wanted to work with a group of students who have some agency in being able to effect change, because sometimes the story we have around fire can make people feel like we can’t do anything. These students can do things. We just looked around the buildings here, and they pointed out, ‘We could rake the leaves!’ That’s something they could totally do. Sixth- to eighth-graders, much as they might tell you they can’t do it, they really can.”

Kirvin agrees that there is plenty these students can do. In addition to learning about the local fire-adapted environment, how they can adapt to fire, and career opportunities in fire science or firefighting, she concludes that, “Just by conducting research and using the scientific method, you are a scientist, in that moment.”

Middle-school teachers who would like to learn more about this free fire-science curriculum, courtesy of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council and educators from the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center, can contact Emily Lord at lord@firesafemendocino.org.