This page is part of the LTER Field Safety Toolkit. The toolkit provides relevant training, documentation, reporting, and readings that help us address barriers and challenges in the field.

Training and Professional Development

One important element of increasing safety awareness is through training and professional development for leadership, staff, students and volunteers. Many institutions offer (and often require) various training related to safety in the field including title ix training or wilderness first aid courses. Below we have compiled a list of training programs available online to supplement or enhance what your home institution offers.

ADVANCEing FieldSafety Training Program

The goal of ADVANCEing FieldSafety is to create and disseminate a field safety, anti-harassment, and bystander intervention certificate training program that is accompanied by the development of a toolkit to support field teams in planning safe and inclusive field campaigns. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is available and hosted on Coursera, allowing easy access and broad participation. The MOOC will have both participation (online, self-paced) and certification pathways (participation + facilitated debriefs/reflections) that will help field teams meet NSF’s new PAPPG field safety and anti-harassment mitigation requirements (NSF, 2023). The MOOC content will also be accompanied by a toolkit, which will contain additional resources and readings relevant to each course module.

Field Futures Workshops

The FieldFutures workshop trains participants to prevent, intervene in, and effectively report incidents of sexual harassment and assault in field settings.

Field Inclusive, Inc Social Field Safety Workshops

Learning and being aware of various social field safety issues that could arise for people who professionally work outdoors — but more specifically — for marginalized and historically excluded individuals is our goal. Social Field Safety Workshops cover the history of minorities in the outdoors, group brainstorming activities, and group discussions about solutions to common social field safety scenarios that could impact certain groups of individuals.

FieldWork Initiative FIEST Training

FIEST Training is a seminar designed to impart onto students a corpus of various strategies on how to minimize potentially dangerous situations, stressing that no student should ever have to endure uncomfortable or potentially threatening situations in order to get their research data or as a rite of passage as a researcher. 

Wilderness First Aid Training and Courses

Don’t have access to a wilderness first aid course at your institution? The American Red Cross curates a list of available training opportunities and you can search for online options, or by location for in person offerings. 

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