What if our landscapes could think—not in the way machines think, but in the way ecosystems remember, adapt, and respond?

In this episode of The Ground Up Podcast, Tim Sallin sits down with Lance Legel, founder of Ecodash and DeepEarth, to explore a bold and emerging frontier: ecological intelligence and the role of digital twins in reshaping how we design, manage, and steward land.

Lance shares his journey at the intersection of software engineering, spatial systems, and ecology, and lays out a vision for digital tools that don’t dominate nature, but listen to it. Together, Tim and Lance explore how ecological data, spatial modeling, and AI could help reveal hidden patterns in soils, plants, water, and climate—while also grappling honestly with the technical, ethical, and operational challenges of turning vision into reality.

The conversation moves fluidly between big-picture systems thinking and practical questions: What does it mean to model living systems responsibly? Where do today’s tools fall short? How do we avoid technological overreach while still embracing innovation? And what role should human judgment, humility, and place-based knowledge play alongside algorithms?

This episode will resonate with anyone curious about the future of land stewardship, the promise and limits of technology, and how we might build tools that align more deeply with life—starting from the ground up.