Career & Field Day

cover of PLT's Green Jobs: Exploring Forest Careers guide over a background of a work with a high visibility vest in the forest

Green Jobs: Exploring Forest Careers

Help youth discover careers in sustainable forestry and conservation. The Green Jobs: Exploring Forest Careers unit includes four hands-on, NGSS-aligned, instructional activities to help youth research forestry jobs.

What’s in a Label?

Students explore the environmental, social, and economic criteria of forest certification and consider possible benefits and limitations of certification for both forests and people.

A seedlings of pine trees in bucket are ready to planting at a forest plantation. A volunteers are planting the seedlings on a empty forest glade. Shooting at cloudy autumn day

Plant a Tree

Never underestimate the power of a tree! In addition to giving us an amazing array of paper and wood products, trees provide a host of other benefits—from shading our backyards to reducing air pollution to helping stabilize the global climate.

Yosemite Valley view

Our Federal Forests

Our nation’s forests are managed to support different outcomes. Students learn how forests can be managed to meet human and environmental needs and examine national parks to identify challenges that forest managers face meeting different needs.

Bachelor and Three Graces + 1 in Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park, California

Nature’s Skyscrapers

Trees come in many shapes and sizes. Students become familiar with tree structure and scale by using different methods to measure them and by making comparisons. They learn the importance of standardized measurements and proper measuring techniques.

Forest fire and clouds of dark smoke in pine stands

Living with Fire

Students learn about the three elements a fire needs to burn and find out how this “fire triangle” can be used to prevent and manage wildland fires, particularly in the wildland–urban interface.

Ute Petroglyphs, Delicate arch hiking trail, Arches National Park, adjacent to the Colorado River, Moab, Utah, USA

If You Were the Boss

Students play the role of forest manager for a 400-acre (162-hectare) public forest, exploring the complex factors that influence management decisions about forest lands.

Water Wonders

The water cycle is the system by which Earth’s water is collected, purified, and distributed from the environment to living things and then returned to the environment.