Wildlands
The Place
The 70-acre wildlands preserve honors the legacy of Coast Miwok/Southern Pomo land stewardship practices and seeks to restore ecological cycles and keystone processes of fire, carbon and life through “regenerative disturbance.” Over the past 30 years, staff, volunteers and students have been steadily working to restore healthy mixed hardwood and conifer forests, coastal prairie and riparian plant and animal communities through active stewardship and “citizen science” monitoring.
Our preserve and field campus provides a site for experimentation in trialing regenerative disturbance techniques and a training ground for sharing our learnings with others.
The Program
Through demonstration, research, education, and campaigns to legitimize holistic stewardship practices, the OAEC Wildlands Restoration Program promotes ecoliteracy and the awareness that humans must be an integral, interconnected and regenerative component of natural systems.
Core elements of the program include our “Fuels to Flows” Campaign, local Fireshed/Watershed Community Organizing, Workforce Development in Holistic Vegetative Management, and Biological Monitoring/Citizen Science.
Wildlands News
Found Gully Model Launches in Partnership with the University of Chicago Data Science Institute and the 11th Hour Project
This spring, Brock Dolman, Wildlands Program Director, presented our new Found Gully Model at an event celebrating five years of community-centered collaborations between the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute (DSI) and 11th Hour Project grantees, including OAEC.
Fuels to Flows: Updates for Spring
This season, our team has strengthened partnerships, laid the groundwork for new training initiatives, consulted on beneficial biomass projects across Northern California, and garnered community support for holistic updates to the California Vegetation Treatment Program.
Kate and Brock Honored with an Eco Hero Award!
This March, the WATER Institute’s own Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist were presented with the 6th Annual Eco Hero Award, granted by the Santa Barbara Permaculture Network to those who have made positive change in the world for more than 30 years.
Watch Fuels to Flows: Bringing nature-based stewardship to the headwaters With the Stewardship Network
WATER Institute Co-Director and Wildlands Director, Brock Dolman, expanded on our Fuels to Flows Campaign for a national network of landscape stewardship professionals. The talk advanced climate-smart, nature-based restoration solutions at the nexus of fire and water. The talk focused on utilizing low-tech process-based restoration (LTPBR) techniques, such as “gully stuffing,” to better steward hydrologic…
Field Training with Robinson Rancheria and TERA Restores Watershed Health
This fall, the WATER Institute reunited with our partners at Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians and Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA) to lead a training featuring low-tech process-based restoration methods from our Fuels to Flows toolkit.
