Research + restoration

Projects

Experiments, deployments and restoration work at the sites: what each project is, where it happens and what is being tracked.

Active projects

  • An open-topped steel ring kiln beside a heap of cut brush, with a small stepladder and long-handled tools leaning against it.

    Active Underway

    Biochar from fuel reduction

    Fuel reduction (clearing fallen and dead wood, pruning low branches, thinning) leaves wood that has to come out anyway. We turn it into biochar on site in flame-cap ring kilns, so little of it has to be hauled, and mix the biochar back into soils the Gold Rush left degraded. Fuel reduction and kiln burns are underway; soil trials and carbon estimates come next.

    San Domingo — Forest carbon sequestration with biochar, Wildfire resilience, Ecological restoration, Water management & soil restoration

  • Oaks against a clear blue sky above a slope of gray, shredded wood mulch, with green shrubs and a patch of dry grass coming up through it.

    Active Underway

    Woodland Hilltop restoration

    Restoring a mixed pine and oak woodland on 22 acres next to downtown Murphys, where a fire-prone thicket of manzanita and toyon grew up after past clear-cutting and gold mining. The work includes contour swales, native wildflower seeding, targeted thinning, walkable trails, an access road and pruning oaks so they grow as trees.

    Woodland Hilltop — Ecological restoration, Wildfire resilience, Water management & soil restoration

  • A quadcopter drone sits on an orange landing pad on a gravel ranch road beside dry grass, with two people beside an equipment case farther down the road.

    Active Underway

    Digital twins of landscapes for active management

    Living, measured models of DeepForest's sites, built from drone photos and 3D models, LiDAR, satellite time series, AI-managed remote sensing and dated field records, and kept for years so active management (thinning, fuel breaks, biochar, seeding and grazing) can be planned, tested and tracked: where the work was done, how the land responds, and the carbon it holds, as estimates.

    San Domingo · Woodland Hilltop — Generational continuity & open datasets, Agentic land stewardship, AI-powered land monitoring

  • Active Underway

    AI-managed remote sensing

    Remote cameras at San Domingo Arbory that upload images on their own, day and night (infrared after dark), and AI processing of drone footage and smartphone photos from the field: part of a broader effort to use computer vision models and AI agents to understand sensor data and images from the sites, feeding our digital twins.

    San Domingo — AI-powered land monitoring, Monitoring biodiversity

  • Active Underway

    Cultural preservation: AI for historical documents and oral histories

    Researching and preserving the history of DeepForest's land from primary sources: homestead files, land patents and deeds, family records, mining-claim and water-right records, newspapers and, with consent, oral histories. AI helps transcribe and summarize; a person checks every claim against the original. We publish stories and sources, never locations.

    San Domingo · Woodland Hilltop — Cultural preservation & engagement with AI