EXPOSED
Lecture slides, syllabi, quiz banks, literature reviews and grant boilerplate are already drafted competently by AI, and much of the grading load for written work is automatable. What holds is the field component this discipline is built on — timber cruising, plot sampling, GPS and dendrometer work, prescribed-burn and silviculture labs, safety supervision in actual forests — plus thesis advising, defense committees, and accountability for whether a graduate can run a stand inventory correctly. The real threat here is enrollment economics and adjunctification in a 1,500-person occupation, not a model replacing the instructor in the woods.
Nearly all of this fall was the 2020 shock. It has been climbing back since.
Median pay $85,450 → $101,420 -5.0% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+4% 1,600 → 1,700 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +4% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 58/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
LecturerProfessorInstructorRange InstructorCollege ProfessorEcology ProfessorForestry ProfessorResearch ProfessorAssistant ProfessorAssociate ProfessorExtension ProfessorForestry InstructorBiometrics InstructorCollege Faculty MemberSilviculture ProfessorForest Products TeacherForestry Faculty MemberForest Ecology ProfessorForest Pathology TeacherForest Management TeacherRange and Road InstructorUniversity Faculty MemberForest Pathology ProfessorForest Resources Professor
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier The seated half of the job — lecture prep, syllabus drafting, quiz banks, literature reviews, extension bulletins — is squarely within what a model does now, but the summer field camps, tree-ID and cruising labs, and semester-long capstone stand-inventory projects still have to be designed, run and assessed on site, which keeps this at 12 rather than the 7-8 of a lecture-only discipline.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Field camp puts you on uneven terrain with chainsaws, drip torches, increment borers and student crews in heat, ticks and standing dead timber — uncontrolled forest, not a teaching lab bench — and 14 rather than 18 only because a real share of the contact hours are still classroom, GIS lab and office.
No licence, no signature requirement No licence gates who teaches forestry: the institution's HR requirements and accreditation (SAF program recognition) attach to the department, not to you personally, so even the Certified Forester or RPF credential many faculty hold is a professional nicety here rather than a legal barrier to your replacement — 3 reflects that burn-boss or pesticide-applicator certifications occasionally sit on individual faculty.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls You call whether a prescribed burn goes ahead with 20 undergraduates on the fireline, whether a thesis is defensible, and whether a graduate is competent to sign off on a stand prescription — those are unshareable calls with real consequences, and 14 not 18 because promotion, curriculum and safety decisions ultimately pass through department and IRB/EHS review.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (12/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (15/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 32 of this occupation's 58 points (55%).
Embodiment (14/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to forestry and conservation science teachers, postsecondary on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 74/100 — SAFE.
Task-mix shift: this discipline genuinely has two tiers. If lecture prep, quiz banks, literature reviews and written-work grading are absorbed, the residual role is field instruction, calibration of student measurements against ground truth, thesis committee work, and licensure-exam/certification readiness — pushing the measured resistance of the remaining day upward without any new law
State forestry board or campus risk-management rule requiring a named, certified burn boss / qualified wildland fire supervisor (NWCG-qualified) of record for any student prescribed-burn or chainsaw lab, with personal certification at stake — mirroring how state burn-permit regimes already name an individual burn boss. This converts a teaching role into a signing role for the highest-risk labs
SAF (Society of American Foresters) accreditation standards specifying minimum contact hours of instructor-supervised field labs — cruising, plot sampling, prescribed burn — that cannot be met by simulation or online delivery; SAF already audits field-skills coverage in its program accreditation reviews, and tightening the field-hours language would hard-wire an in-woods instructor per cohort
Formal instructor sign-off tied to a credential a student carries into practice — e.g. Certified Forester eligibility, state registered-forester licensure (present in California, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Maine, etc.) requiring named faculty attestation of field competency rather than transcript credit alone
Campus insurer conditions coverage for student field trips involving felling, ATVs, or fire on documented instructor-of-record supervision ratios; already a visible trend in university field-course risk policies post-incident
The limit. Nothing here touches the actual binding constraint: 1,520 workers in a discipline whose enrollment is flat-to-declining. Every lever above raises the value of the instructor who remains while the number of lines funded keeps shrinking, and adjunctification strips exactly the liability-of-record and committee-accountability roles that would otherwise score. Trust premium has no realistic route up — students and legislatures pay for the credential and the field hours, not for the specific human lecturing.
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 60 | $101,420 +0% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 60 | $101,420 +0% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 58. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.