San Jose, California
The biggest city in the Bay, between two ranges that burn.
San Jose fills the south end of the bay between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range, both of which burned in the 2020 lightning complexes, with a street tree program, a river park through downtown and a water district that owns the creeks. Canopy inventory, fuels on the hills and riparian mapping are the flights that fit.
The ground
San Jose and Santa Clara County
The city lies on the valley floor with the Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek running north to the bay through parks and a redeveloped downtown. West the Santa Cruz Mountains climb through redwood and oak to Skyline; east the Diablo Range rises bare and gold to Mount Hamilton, where the 2020 SCU Lightning Complex burned nearly four hundred thousand acres. South, Coyote Valley is the last open farmland between San Jose and Morgan Hill, now partly in conservation.
Who buys mapping here
- City of San Jose: the Department of Transportation's street tree program, Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services, Environmental Services, the GIS group
- Our City Forest and the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy
- Valley Water, the Santa Clara Valley Water District, and its stream maintenance program
- Santa Clara County: Parks and Recreation, the Office of Emergency Management, the Santa Clara County FireSafe Council
- Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District and the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority
- San Jose Water, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the CAL FIRE Santa Clara Unit
- San Jose State University, Stanford University's lands and the technology campuses with grounds to manage
- Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Milpitas, Morgan Hill and Gilroy
Getting there
From Medford
Seven hours from Medford by road or a short flight into San Jose with the aircraft in its cases. The South Bay is one trip with the Peninsula and the East Bay.
The public lidar
What exists, and what it misses
Santa Clara County and the state have flown lidar across the valley and the hills, and the water district and the county use it for floodplain and planning work. For the street tree program, the park forests and the open space districts' fuels work the question is the current crown by crown record and the treated unit measured, which the valley wide data does not give.
What we would fly
The lanes that fit San Jose
Nearest work
Santa Clara County is not on the log. What the Oregon record shows for it: a city inventory of twelve thousand crowns, a town's fuels data behind its wildfire plan, and a creek corridor classified by species.
Finding every Oregon ash before the borer does
City of Eugene, Parks and Open Space
12,632 crowns classified across 390 acres of riparian canopy. 5,261 of them Oregon ash.
Read the case
Citywide LiDAR for the Ashland CWPP
City of Ashland
Citywide drone LiDAR that gave the 2025 Ashland Community Wildfire Protection Plan its ladder fuel and structure exposure numbers.
Read the case
Riparian species and cold seeps on the Scott River
Cascade Stream Solutions, with a botanist leading field identification. We flew it as their subcontractor and reported to them.
Fourteen riparian species classified across 423 acres of river corridor, with thermal mapping that pointed to groundwater fed cold seeps.
Read the caseThe record
Every project we have published
Forestry and trees
- Downed woody debris, measured from the air
- Finding every Oregon ash before the borer does
- At risk, declining, dieback, dead
- Post harvest monitoring for ODF
- A planting corridor through Phoenix, tree by tree
Rivers and habitat
- Riparian species and cold seeps on the Scott River
- Ten abandoned mines, bare earth under the chaparral
Wildfire fuels and planning
Night infrared on fires
- Night infrared on ODF incidents since 2019
- East Evans Creek, a season inside one fire
- Fielder Mountain, eleven nights as the heat went out
- Woodrat Mountain, from initial attack to the last check
- Interstate 5 at milepost 57, initial attack beside the freeway
- Tyee Ridge Complex
Terrain and site design
Farm planning
San Jose and the South Bay.
A street tree district, a park, a creek reach for the water district or a fuels unit on either range. Tell us which agency is asking and the South Bay goes on the trip.
Email info@roguerecon.net or call 808 298 6290.