Damien Ouellette

You pull off the freeway and drive this way and you see a green stamp of 10,000 square feet.

You plant one tree, that's just a tree.

But once you start having the canopy connect, that starts to be what we imagine as a forest.

We have this kind of blockage of the sunlight, but also a forest has layers.

And he developed the idea of this kind of tiny forest approach to restoring degraded land.

So you're kind of planting a whole ecosystem at one time instead of waiting for nature to kind of go through succession step by step to get eventually to a forest.

It's planting the whole forest at one moment.

Every two weeks, going back and forth between the two of them, counting how many insects we're finding, what birds are there, what lizards are moving through there.

We find some cool field mice, some spiders, all sorts of neat things that we find here in the microforest that aren't over there in the control plot.

Which prior to this microforest being planted, we had an idea that there were only 100 species being documented in the whole park.

Spider webs are kind of a filter for the air.

And as animals move through their environment, they're shedding skin cells and metabolic waste that floats in the air that sticks to the spider web.

So then we came out here, we collected spider webs.

and washed the DNA off those spider webs and then got an idea of what are all the animals moving through here within the last 24, 48 hours using genetic tools.

We had a barn owl that I've never seen in there, and it's definitely flying through the area at night, and we're picking up a signature of that being here.

So it just gives us a more full picture of how is this really behaving like a forest.

It's not just when we're conveniently here.

It's all hours of the day and night.

We don't use tape measures.

We just say, well, how tall are you?