Sonoma County sits at the center of one of North America’s most ecologically active and fire-prone regions. The hills east of Santa Rosa support a dense mix of oak woodlands, grasslands, and chaparral that have shaped Northern California’s natural character for centuries — and that now face measurable pressure from drought, invasive species, and the kind of high-intensity wildfires that have reshaped how land managers and researchers think about fire ecology.
For J-P Conte, managing partner of his family office Lupine Crest Capital, supporting the scientific and educational work happening in that terrain has been a meaningful part of his philanthropic commitments. His approach to giving has consistently favored institutions that produce verifiable, long-term outcomes over shorter-horizon initiatives, and conservation science done at a serious institutional level fits that framework.
Conte works closely with Pepperwood Preserve, an ecological research institute and 3,200-acre biological reserve located in eastern Sonoma County. The preserve operates the Dwight Center for Conservation Science, a research hub that hosts scientists from around the world studying climate change, ecosystem health, and wildfire dynamics in California’s coast ranges. The combination of a working scientific field station with a significant tract of protected open space makes Pepperwood unusual — a place where long-term data collection and active land management happen on the same property.
What Does Pepperwood Preserve Actually Research?
Pepperwood’s research covers a wide range of conservation science work, with wildfire ecology as a primary focus. The preserve maintains 32 grassland monitoring stations and 50 forest stations, with data at many sites spanning five to ten years or more. That longitudinal baseline is what short-cycle studies cannot replicate.
One of Pepperwood’s most significant technical contributions has been applying LIDAR — Light Detection and Ranging — to wildfire risk assessment at the regional scale. By positioning pulse lasers in aircraft to measure forest structure in precise three-dimensional detail, researchers can identify “fuel ladders,” the accumulated foliage along tree trunks that carries fire from the ground into the forest canopy. “We’ve found that heavy ladder fuels closely correspond to where fires burn the hottest,” said Lisa Micheli, President and CEO of Pepperwood.
The preserve also helped build a network of AlertWildfire cameras — real-time imaging devices delivering live feeds to emergency dispatchers and the public. Forty cameras across Sonoma, Napa, Marin, Mendocino, and Lake counties provide continuous coverage of a region where early fire detection can determine whether a fire is contained quickly or spreads unchecked.
How Does Prescribed Fire Research Translate Into Practice?
The science Pepperwood produces matters most when it reaches the people managing land outside the preserve’s property lines: the private landowners, municipal fire agencies, and organizations making day-to-day decisions about fire risk across Sonoma County. That translation from research into applied practice is central to Pepperwood’s operating model.
Prescribed burning is one of Pepperwood’s primary tools for both research and demonstration. The preserve conducts controlled burns on its own land to study how fire moves through Northern California ecosystems, reduce accumulated fuel loads, and test techniques that landowners elsewhere in the region can adopt. When fires burn at low intensity on a regular cycle, they clear undergrowth from oak woodlands without damaging mature trees — the opposite of what occurs when decades of fire suppression allow fuel to build and then ignite under dry, windy conditions.
Community education runs alongside the field research. Following the devastating 2017 North Bay wildfires, Pepperwood co-organized the Living with Fire in California’s Coast Ranges Symposium, a three-day gathering at Sonoma State University that drew more than 400 participants from the scientific community, fire safety agencies, private landowners, and the general public. The goal was to move science out of the field station and into the hands of the people positioned to act on it.
That model of applied knowledge-sharing has continued. In 2024, Pepperwood partnered with the Sonoma Ecology Center and Occidental Arts and Ecology Center to launch Tending the Land for Fire Resilience in Sonoma County, a free online resource for landowners and managers covering prescribed burns, invasive species control, and water conservation. “It is great to have a community resource that incorporates so much nuance of Sonoma County ecology,” said Devyn Friedfel, Assistant Preserve Manager at Pepperwood. “Tending the Land has value to all land stewards in our county, whether they are professionals, land owners, or interested community members.”
Why Does J-P Conte Prioritize Long-Term Conservation Investment?
Pepperwood’s reach extends well past its own acreage. The preserve anchors a regional initiative called the Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, designed to maintain wildlife movement corridors across a fragmented North Bay terrain. Its peer-reviewed publications inform management decisions by federal agencies, land trusts, and municipal fire departments across several counties.
J-P Conte’s philanthropic record elsewhere follows the same pattern of supporting institutions with deep operational roots and measurable public impact. His contributions include a $5 million gift to UCSF for Parkinson’s and neurodegenerative disease research, a $25 million donation to Colgate University for a student social center, and the Conte First Generation Fund operating at 11 universities. Each commitment, including his work with Pepperwood, favors organizations positioned to produce outcomes across years and decades rather than single program cycles.
Northern California’s wildfire challenge is not a short-term problem. The fuel accumulation driving high-intensity fires is the result of a century of suppression policy, compounded by sustained drought and rising temperatures. Pepperwood’s research on prescribed fire regimes, fuel density, invasive species behavior, and wildlife corridor integrity addresses conditions that will define land management in the region for a generation.
“I support projects with longevity and dignity at their core, rather than superficial responses,” Jean-Pierre Conte has said about how he approaches his philanthropic work. For J-P Conte, Pepperwood sits at the intersection of those priorities: a scientifically rigorous institution doing applied work on one of Northern California’s most consequential environmental challenges, with the educational reach to translate that science into practical action across the region.
Read “How Businesses Can Support Wildfire Prevention And Their Communities” by Jean-Pierre Conte.