Our team hosted a volunteer day on September 3rd, 2022. A corporate group from Moncton participated. This event was organized by One Tree Planted (if your corporation would like to do something similar, you should reach out to them).
The morning in question was beautiful weather. Sunny and cool - a perfect day for planting trees.
The group of volunteers arrived between 8:00am and 8:30am. We gathered everyone together at the main parking area, and started with a quick site safety meeting. Immediately after that, we talked for quite a while about the site characteristics, the existing trees and plants that the volunteers would encounter, the seedlings that we would be planting, and the future plans for the site. After that, we moved into the wooded area for a demonstration on how to plant.
Once everyone had seen a demonstration of the best techniques to plant the seedlings, we moved back to load up our buckets with trees, and to ensure that everyone had a planting shovel. We then spread out into a large five acre area to plant the seedlings.
The majority of the trees that were planted were eastern white pine (Pinus strobus).
The area that was planted was one that had been thinned significantly over the past few years. The area originally contained a large number of unhealthy, rotten balsam fir. This species tends to rot and die fairly early (40-50 years) instead of achieving true maturity, because the area is a bit too far to the southern edge of the range for that species. We cleaned out a lot of the dead trees, and the goal was to replace them with trees that are most resilient in the face of expected future climate change. Eastern white pine was a great species for that site, because there are very few of that type of tree on the site already, but the local ecology supports the growth of that tree. Eastern white pine also grows to be very large at maturity, so it is an excellent choice in terms of carbon sequestration. It is also a fairly shade tolerant tree, well-suited for growing up to augment the existing semi-mature forest cover.
Here are a few photos of the volunteers at work!
To see more photos from our various 2022 projects, visit our 2021 Planting Photos collection on Dropbox.
You can learn more about this particular planting site by visiting our Demonstration Forests page and finding the Walker Road Managed Forest. Here's a drone overview of the site, taken in winter to better show the contrast. The area that the volunteers covered is outlined in red. You can see how the forest in that area is somewhat thin and in these areas, but our new trees will make it a lot healthier!
Altogether, our volunteers and Replant.ca Environmental mentoring team planted a total of three thousand trees that day. Great work! A big thanks to everyone who was involved.
Thanks for reading!
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.
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