Participants in New York Wildfire and Incident Management Academy spent an action-packed Wednesday learning about firefighting.

"The reason why we're here today is to teach firefighters how to fight fire and use fire as a firefighting tool," said Bill Fonda, with New York Wildlife and Incident Management Academy.

He said the second reason "is to maintain the habitat that we have here for grassland birds and other species that are dependent on grasslands."

Landscape ecologist Nolan Calamia works for the Sisters of Saint Joseph in Brentwood.

"Traditionally, we’ve had a lot of lawn, it’s an old Long Island estate sort of layout, but we’ve been rewilding a lot of that lawn with native grasslands and meadows and in order to care for those meadows properly we’ve started to do controlled burns on them," he said.

Calamia said in order to do it safely and correctly, he and others have attended the NYWIMA training.

The academy classes continue through Friday.