Tree Planting Project at Mactaquac Provincial Park (2021)

This fall, Replant.ca Environmental started a long-term planting project at Mactaquac Provincial Park.  This work was made possible thanks to a sponsorship from the Trees For Life organization.  Learn more about Trees For Life at www.treesforlife.ca

Mactaquac Provincial Park is only a 30 minute drive from Fredericton, over to the west through either Keswick or French Village.  The park is situated on the St. John River, across from the Mactaquac Dam and power generating station.  This station generates one eighth of the electricity for the entire province of New Brunswick.

 

Here's a graphic (courtesy of Google Earth) showing the location of the park:

 

Mactaquac has a golf course, campground, two beaches, hiking trails, and [in the winter] it also has cross-country skiing trails.  The camping options are excellent, with around four hundred camping sites and several rustic cabins.  The washrooms and showers were extremely clean, and the entire project was a wonderful experience.  Here's a link for anyone who wants to make reservations:

https://www.parcsnbparks.info/en/parks/10/mactaquac-provincial-park

In 2014, the first named hurricane of the season was Hurricane Arthur.  It was a very early hurricane, hitting North America in early July.  It swept up the east coast and over the Maritime provinces.  The winds did a tremendous amount of damage to trees and infrastructure, especially in the Fredericton area.  Mactaquac was hit quite hard, and lost a lot of trees.  Our goal was to start the slow process of replanting some of the areas that had blown down during that storm several years earlier, and also to begin creating new wooded areas in other sections of the park.

The Replant.ca Environmental team planted 48,564 young seedlings within the park in 2021.  A total of seven species were planted:  Red spruce, white spruce, eastern white pine, eastern larch, eastern white cedar, northern (red) oak, and sugar maple.  This was the first phase of a multi-year program, and both the species diversity and the number of hardwoods will be increased significantly in 2022 and 2023.  We plan to eventually provide more than sixteen different species (six conifers and ten deciduous) to the park.

The team covered a number of different planting areas within the park.  The next three images show the approximate locations of newly planted seedlings (shaded in cyan).  Please note that these two photos are not perfectly oriented with north to the top, as is common in cartography.  However, they fit better in the blog post this way:

Here are a few photos of the team in action at Mactaquac:

 

   

You can see more photos of our 2021 tree planting work in our public 2021 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox.

We'd like to thank Kevin (the Park Manager) and his staff for their hospitality and support while we were on site.  We definitely look forward to returning in 2022 to continue the work that Trees For Life is making possible.

 

Edit:  If you'd like to read about the continuation of our work on this site in 2022, visit this link:

https://replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2023/02/tree-planting-project-at-mactaquac.html

Jonathan "Scooter" Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest! 

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.