A field safety plan (FSP) is a document that you create prior to conducting any field work or course and should be updated regularly (ex: before each field season or semester). Ideally, you create this document with your team, and every person has the opportunity to identify hazards or risks that they have about the work. This is also important in the section of the field safety plan that acts a set of community guidelines. This document should be shared with the PI and department in case of emergency prior to leaving for fieldwork. The plan should always be easily available to all members of the team during any fieldwork.
NOTE: If you are traveling for the work or using boats, drones, ATVs, planes, or snowmobiles, UC Berkeley has specific documents and plans that you must turn in. These can be found in The Field Operations Safety Manual.
As of Fall 2024, it is now recommended by the department that each project or course with a field component create and share a field safety plan with all members of the project and the department. In addition, graduate students with field components to their research are expected to submit a field safety plan with their prospectus and yearly thereafter.
It is not required that you utilize one of these templates when creating a FSP to submit to the department. However, these templates are available for your use if you are unsure of what to consider in a plan or want to be thorough in your planning.
We have created two field research specific template safety plans.
The Comprehensive Research FSP acts as an expansive document to prompt your thinking, planning, and preparation prior to fieldwork. It is expected that not all template chunks will apply to your project, and you can delete whatever you deem irrelevant. This FSP can be used for international and domestic travel and aims to consider physical, personal, mental, and environmental risks you may encounter during work.
The Abridged Research FSP serves as a starting point with just the explicitly necessary components. This template should be used as an entry point if you find field safety planning overwhelming. We hope that over time, your FSP will become more comprehensive, but this will suffice a FSP for the department.
We have created three field course specific template safety plans.
The Comprehensive Field Course FSP is similar to the comprehensive research FSP. It is expected that not all template chunks will apply to your project, and you can delete whatever you deem irrelevant. This FSP can be used for international and domestic courses and aims to consider physical, personal, mental, and environmental risks you may encounter during work.
The Domestic Field Course FSP contains all potentially relevant planning chunks for domestic excursions. It is another comprehensive document that you can remove unnecessary sections from.
The Day Trip FSP is an abridged document that is appropriate for courses where you are doing excursions that last less than a full day. You should include details from all expected day trips in the one document to avoid submitting multiple plans per semester.
Each of our templates includes a short prompt to consider how to respond if you encounter immigration enforcement officers in the field.
If you would like to expand this to better prepare for immigration enforcement activity, you should explore our Immigration Enforcement Protocol Template.
Because field team members may not disclose their immigration status, there is no way to know whether this concern directly affects a particular member of your field team. For that reason, it is strongly recommended that the issue and expected responses be planned and discussed with participants.
When should I submit a plan?
If you have current active projects or classes, you need to submit your plan before the activity occurs.
The goal is to have all plans submitted before the fieldwork takes place in order to have up-to-date and accurate information in case we need it for emergencies.
If I have several projects or courses, do I need a separate plan for each?
Yes. Each class or substantively different field project should have a separate plan.
How often do I need to update the plan?
We recommend updating your FSP yearly for research projects and every semester for teaching course FSPs. If nothing has changed (including team members, medications, emergency contacts, etc), then you do not need to submit new FSPs to the department yearly.
However, we strongly recommend revisiting the document often, updating risks and protocol with information from near misses or incidents, and ensuring every team member's personal information is up to date.
What does the content of the plan need to include?
We would recommend using the field safety plan template above for a comprehensive plan. At the very least, plans should include contacts on campus, contacts on site, a check-in plan, emergency contacts for all members, and a thorough consideration of risks involved with all parts of the job.
Can I get help preparing a plan?
This page has links to redacted example plans for reference.
In addition, if you would like someone to walk through creating a plan or discuss a plan that has already been made, Mel Baldino (melbaldino@berkeley.edu) offers one-on-one consultations scheduled via email.
Who can view the plans?
When you submit a plan to ESPM departmental staff, those plans are only accessible by members of the ESPM council and Sara Souza from EH&S.
What happens if I do not follow the new departmental policy?
This is a pilot effort intended to build support through proactive participation rather than forced compliance. Central collation of plans would enable us and the campus to make contact with team leads in the case of an emergency. There are no negative consequences planned for non-compliance. The department manager will report aggregate statistics on usage of the system to the department on an annual basis, and may follow up with individuals who are known to carry out fieldwork but have not participated in the process
Safe & Inclusive Off-Campus Research Checklist: a checklist from UC Berkeley's EH&S providing guidance on how to create a NSF appropriate field safety plan.