Job Check
Forest and Conservation Workers
Under supervision, perform manual labor necessary to develop, maintain, or protect areas such as forests, forested areas, woodlands, wetlands, and rangelands through such activities as raising and transporting seedlings; combating insects, pests, and diseases harmful to plant life; and building structures to control water, erosion, and leaching of soil. Includes forester aides, seedling pullers, tree planters, and gatherers of nontimber forestry products such as pine straw.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Check equipment to ensure that it is operating properly.Mostly human for now
- 02Fight forest fires or perform prescribed burning tasks under the direction of fire suppression officers or forestry technicians.Mostly human for now
- 03Perform fire protection or suppression duties, such as constructing fire breaks or disposing of brush.Mostly human for now
- 04Confer with other workers to discuss issues, such as safety, cutting heights, or work needs.Mostly human for now
- 05Maintain tallies of trees examined and counted during tree marking or measuring efforts.AI could speed this up a lot
- 06Explain or enforce regulations regarding camping, vehicle use, fires, use of buildings, or sanitation.Mostly human for now
- 07Operate skidders, bulldozers, or other prime movers to pull a variety of scarification or site preparation equipment over areas to be regenerated.Mostly human for now
- 08Spray or inject vegetation with insecticides to kill insects or to protect against disease or with herbicides to reduce competing vegetation.Mostly human for now
- 09Thin or space trees, using power thinning saws.Mostly human for now
- 10Identify diseased or undesirable trees and remove them, using power saws or hand saws.Mostly human for now
Tasks from O*NET® 31.0 (US Department of Labor, CC BY 4.0, changed by us), most important first. “Already use” comes from Anthropic’s data on real work chats with Claude; “could speed up” from task ratings made with GPT-4 in 2023.
Four studies, side by side
None is a forecast of job lossToo little dataNot enough work use was seen to measure. This does not mean the job is safe from AI.Anthropic, 2026
4%of this job’s tasks an AI model could do in half the time, counting tasks that need extra tools as half (rated in 2023).Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, 2023
Above 20% of jobsin how often and how well AI helped with this job’s work in Microsoft Copilot chats (2024 data).Microsoft Research (Tomlinson et al.), 2025
Above 93% of jobsin how much of this job’s physical work robots have been shown to do, from factories to homes (2026).Anthropic, 2026
Your human edge
The main tasks with no real AI use seen and no big speed-up expected. This is where your skill counts most today.
- Check equipment to ensure that it is operating properly.
- Fight forest fires or perform prescribed burning tasks under the direction of fire suppression officers or forestry technicians.
- Perform fire protection or suppression duties, such as constructing fire breaks or disposing of brush.