The Northern California wildfires destroyed not only people's homes but also tens of thousands of acres of land.
That's why the California Native Plant Society is asking people to please send acorns!
Dan Gluesenkamp, California Native Plant Society (CNPS) executive director, showed ABC10 News around the Sacramento offices Tuesday afternoon.
"This is our conference room/library, which has kind of been taken over by volunteers...who are coming in to help process this flood of acorns that we received," he said.
The CNPS put out a call for acorns on Friday evening. By Tuesday afternoon, they'd received more than 1,500 boxes of acorns from all over the state, though mostly from Wine Country.
The statewide non-profit wants to restore the oak trees burned in last month's wildfires.
"In wine country, there's a study that found 350 different plants, animals, insects, birds that benefit from oaks," he said. "So when you restore an oak, you're restoring the whole community."
It plans on distributing some acorns for planting this year and will keep the others in tree nurseries, sprouting and growing them for planting next fall.
"This is an incredible acorn year; There's a lot of acorns on the ground," Gluesenkamp said, "So at the same that there's a need to replace trees that have died...we find that there's a great opportunity with all these acorns on the ground and with thousands of people looking for something that they can do to help."
The CNPS has on its website specific instructions for how and where to send the acorns.
"Ultimately, we want to send our oaks back out to the places from which the acorns came," Gluesenkamp said. "We want to maintain kind of restoration-quality material so that we're maintaining the local biodiversity and we're not just restoring oaks to the land but we're restoring a connection with all the pollenators and the insects and the soil biodiversity."
Sometimes big change starts with a small seed.
Visit the CNPS website to learn more about how to send acorns.