Lesson Overview: Students go through a power point explaining what a fire regime is. Then in small groups students will learn about one information source for fire regimes in the oak woodlands and share that with the group. The class will then debate what they think the fire regime of the oak woodlands is and how modern people should manage fire in the oak woodlands.

Lesson Goal: To provide student with a baseline understanding of how and when fires have happened in the northern California oak woodlands for the past few thousand years.

Objectives:

• Students can explain how scientists construct historic fire regimes.
• Students can describe the fire regime in the oak woodlands prior to European settlement, during the gold rush through the early 1900’s and then today.
• Students can describe the ways frequent low intensity fire helped to shape the ecosystem and how it increases fire resiliency.