We’ve spent decades arguing about cutting carbon. Less about where it should go once it’s out of the air. Nature, it turns out, already has a plan.
Forests, estuaries, and grasslands have been running quiet carbon economies for millennia — absorbing, storing, and releasing it in intricate cycles we barely understand. The CARBS project, short for Convergence to Accelerate Research on Biological Sequestration, is an ambitious attempt to change that.
Led by a team of scientists, tribal leaders, and data researchers across the Pacific Northwest, CARBS is building a new framework for understanding how carbon moves — from the atmosphere into the soil, and back again — using a combination of artificial intelligence, genomics, ecosystem science, and Indigenous knowledge.
“Essentially, we think about conservation, sustainable management, and restoration as three pillars,” says Dr. Lucas Silva, one of the project’s leads. “The convergence of different disciplines and peoples is what makes this work different. It’s not theory — it’s collaboration.”
That collaboration happens in the field, not the boardroom. Teams are installing flux towers in salt marshes, collecting soil cores, and mapping DNA traces to reconstruct ecosystem change across gradients — from coastal estuaries to inland forests. “These towers are like breathalysers for the landscape,” explains field researcher Lillian Aoki. “They measure carbon dioxide moving in and out of the ecosystem every few seconds — tracking the land’s metabolism.”
By combining isotope tracing and environmental DNA, researchers can follow the carbon’s invisible journey. With AI, they can scale those insights across regions, linking satellite imagery with microscopic data to predict how ecosystems behave under stress. “AI lets us embrace complexity,” says data scientist Jake Searcy. “It helps us see patterns no human could see alone.”
Yet CARBS is more than a data project. It’s a partnership with people whose lives and cultures have long been tied to the land. For the Coquille Indian Tribe, the work is about more than sequestration. “The estuaries here were once filled in and choked to make way for cattle,” recalls a tribal representative. “We want to know what the river looked like before that — and how to restore it. This is about self-determination as much as climate.”
By co-designing restoration strategies, CARBS is helping communities reclaim both ecological and cultural agency. The result is what the team calls “ecological intelligence” — an approach that sees carbon not as a commodity, but as part of a living, adaptive system.
The team’s ultimate goal is to develop “personalised medicine” for ecosystems: locally informed models that respect the historical and social context of every landscape. “It’s not about one-size-fits-all mandates,” Silva says. “It’s about creating flexible options that communities can actually use.”
Because carbon isn’t just chemistry. It’s culture, soil, ancestry, and future — all bound together in cycles of exchange.
CARBS is proving that when science is co-produced, co-owned, and co-implemented, it can become something far more powerful: a living network of knowledge designed not just to study the planet, but to heal it.
