Replant.ca Environmental

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian organization whose vision is to help our global environment through planting trees. We build demonstration forests that are accessible to the public. We also plant in public parks, and we build carbon capture plantations that help mitigate climate change. Our operations are funded by NGO's, corporations, and numerous small donations from global citizens who know that their individual actions will help make a difference.

Showing posts with label life. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2023

Tree Planting Project at Murray Beach Provincial Park, in New Brunswick (2022)

This past Fall (2022), Replant.ca Environmental continued work on a long-term planting project at Murray Beach Provincial Park that we had started in 2021. This park is located in southeastern New Brunswick. This work was made possible thanks to a sponsorship from the TreeEra organization.

Murray Beach Provincial Park is only a 45 minute drive from Moncton, on a very scenic route along part of New Brunswick's Acadian coast. New Brunswick has a 750km drive called the "Acadian Coastal Drive," and Murray Beach Provincial Park is on this trail (Route 955), near the southern end of the trail, in Murray Corner. The park is near the Little Shemogue River (pronounced Shim-o-Gui), and overlooks the Northumberland Strait.

The waters of the Northumberland Strait (which is part of the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, between the mainland and PEI) are known for being some of the warmest Atlantic waters north of Virginia, and are very popular with tourists. You can see the Northumberland Strait in the background of this photo:

Not surprisingly, Murray Beach has a beautiful beach, and the park also has over one hundred camping sites, plus eight cabins. To make reservations, visit this link.

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

The September weather was grey but warm when we were at the park this year. But there was work to be done, so we couldn't let ourselves get distracted by the beach.

Unfortunately, Murray Beach was hit by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Luckily, the damages were not as severe here as in many of the other parks in the region, but there was still a significant loss of mature trees.

The Replant.ca Environmental team planted 5,189 young seedlings in this park in 2022. This was the second phase of a multi-year program, and the number of hardwoods will be increased significantly in 2024. We plan to eventually provide more than seventeen different species (seven conifers and ten deciduous) to the park.

We had done a pre-planting site assessment in August 2022, a few weeks before the planting team arrived, in order to assess the success of the 2021 seedlings. We were very pleased with the results. We lost a few hundred of the 2021 trees (probably due to the heat wave in early August) in two exposed patches close to the beach, but the rest of the seedlings looked good, and the areas with slightly more shade looked especially healthy and vibrant. Considering the challenging temperatures that last year's trees had to deal with during the heat wave, the success rate was excellent.

Our 2022 work continued the efforts made in 2021, with a bit of infilling in areas that were started last year, plus additional trees in various brush patches throughout the park.

Here are a few photos of the team in action at Murray Beach in September 2022:

We will be returning to this site in 2024 to finish the last phase of the work when we add a number of additional hardwood species. As we wrap up the work on the site, we will also be re-planting the gaps in both edges of the walking corridor that encircles the entire site. We will be using larger trees for that specific part of the project, which are being grown right now at our central staging area in preparation.

You can see more photos of our 2022 tree planting work on this site by visiting our public 2022 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "Murray Beach" sub-folder.

We'd like to thank Michel (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.

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.

Tree Planting Project at Mactaquac Provincial Park, in New Brunswick (2022)

This past Fall (2022), Replant.ca Environmental finished the second phase of our tree planting project at Mactaquac Provincial Park. We had already started work on this site in the Fall of 2021. This work was made possible thanks to a sponsorship from the Trees For Life organization, for whom we work as a supply partner.

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:

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 32,963 young seedlings within the park in 2022. As noted, this was the second phase of a multi-year program, and both the species diversity and the number of hardwoods will continue to be increased significantly in 2023 and 2024. 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 two images show the approximate locations of newly planted seedlings (highlighted):

Most of the planned planting for this site involved planting tree seedlings in fairly open areas, where the Park staff wanted to turn some of the under-utilized fields and openings into future mature stands of trees. This latter goal is important for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation, and provides additional habitat for birds and wildlife. It also allows the Park to better manage their budget for grounds maintenance (controlling the costs related to mowing the grass). There was also a bit of underplanting in some of the thinner sections of woods that are still recovering from the damage created by Hurricane Arthur.

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

You can see more photos of our 2022 tree planting work on this site by visiting our public 2022 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "Mactaquac Provincial Park" sub-folder.

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 2023 to continue the work that Trees For Life is making possible.

Jonathan "Scooter" Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Tree Planting Project at Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park, New Brunswick (2022)

Replant.ca Environmental started a long-term planting project at Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park in 2021. We continued this work in the Fall of 2022. Hopewell Rocks is located in southeastern New Brunswick. This work was made possible thanks to a sponsorship from the Trees For Life organization.

Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park is only a 35 minute drive from Moncton, down to the south through Riverview. The park is situated on the world-famous Bay of Fundy. The park itself doesn't have camping sites, although there are private campgrounds open to the public only a few minutes away (such as the Ponderosa Pines campground).

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

Hopewell Rocks is famous due to its iconic beach rocks, which tell a story interwoven by time, tides, and the intricacies of nature. Located on what is officially known as the Hopewell Rocks Ocean Tidal Exploration Site, these rocks (also known as the Flowerpot Rocks) are composed of sandstone and sedimentary conglomerate rock. The rock formations were originally part of the shoreline, but over time, water eroded cracks in the cliffs and eventually caused some parts to appear to have become "separated" from the main cliffs. As tides come in and out, the water gradually erodes the base of the rocks underneath the high tide line, causing the unique shape. In 2016, part of the Elephant Rock sheared off, as was noted in this CBC article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/hopewell-rocks-new-brunswick-collapse-1.3491431

That article has some good photos, including a photo at the bottom that illustrates the enormous difference in water level between low tide and high tide. The Bay of Fundy has some of the world's largest tides.

And then in 2022, we lost the Flowerpot Rock (located on the Fundy Trail Parkway, not within Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park):

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/flowerpot-rock-new-brunswick-attraction-1.6362819

If you'd like to learn more about Hopewell Rocks, this website is a great resource:

www.parcsnbparks.info/en/parks/33/hopewell-rocks-provincial-park

Unfortunately, some of the seedlings that we planted in 2021 didn't survive. A few got mowed accidentally, but there was also mortality in the exposed areas (especially throughout and around the parking lot) which initially puzzled us. We didn't see this same issue with widespread mortality on the numerous other sites that we planted in 2021. It's possible that the stock that we used on this site was the problem, but we don't think so. We also examined the possibility of salt in the area contributing to the issue, due to the proximity of the ocean, but three other coastal sites that we planted in 2021 did quite well in comparison. After some debate, we finally decided that the heat wave of August 2022 was probably the culprit.

The Maritime provinces had a record-breaking heat wave in early August, and we did see evidence of scattered and intermittent recent seedling mortality when we re-visited 2021 sites such as Victoria Park, Murray Beach, and Parlee Beach in September. But the problem was much more severe in Hopewell Rocks than on those other sites, and perhaps not coincidentally, the seedlings at Hopewell Rocks were also the ones that were the most exposed to sunlight and heat (and pavement adjacent to the seedlings). Trees in areas that were shaded from the afternoon sun seemed to survive, but exposed trees didn't. The evidence seems quite strong that the heat wave was the root cause, which is disheartening but not completely unexpected. Climate change is real, and it's a challenge in many ways. Until these seedlings have a chance to get established for about three years, they'll continue to be especially susceptible to high temperatures. But we will not give up.

The Replant.ca Environmental team planted 15,044 new young seedlings within the park in 2022. We plan to eventually provide more than sixteen different species (six conifers and ten deciduous) to the park. Most of the seedlings in this year's program were scattered throughout the understory beside the maintenance trails and the new hiking trail, anywhere that the woods were thin and needed reinforcement. These young trees will all get some intermittent shade and sunshine throughout the day, and shouldn't have any problems with future heat waves. Meanwhile, for the open areas from 2021 that experienced mortality, we're going to try a different approach in 2024 with larger stock that is already growing now in preparation.

Here are a few photos of the team in action at Hopewell Rocks, although we didn't take as many photos on this site as we did the previous year:

You can see more photos of our 2022 tree planting work in our public 2022 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox.

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

Jonathan "Scooter" Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Tree Planting Project at the Fundy Trail Parkway, New Brunswick (2022)

Edit: The post on this page refers to work in Fundy Provincial Park in 2022. To learn more about the subsequent 2024 phase of planting in this park, visit:

www.replant-environmental.blogspot.com/2024/11/tree-planting-at-fundy-trail-provincial.html

---

Our organization did some tree planting work in the Fundy Trail Parkway this past September (2022). This work was funded entirely by the Trees For Life organization as the Project Sponsor.

The Fundy Trail Parkway is a 30 kilometer long drive through a 2500+ hectare park, hugging the coastal cliffs along southern New Brunswick. It has stunning views of the Bay of Fundy, and the area encompasses two separate UNESCO designated sites (the Fundy Biosphere Reserve and the Stanhammer Global GeoPark). The area is also home to the start of the "Fundy Footpath" hiking path, which is rated as one of the top fifty hiking trails in the world! Fundy National Park is very close.

The Parkway is a not-for-profit and charitable park (not part of Fundy National Park) run by a skills-based board of directors, who are appointed for three-year terms by New Brunswick's Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Heritage.

Here's a graphic showing the approximate region where we were working:

The approximate GPS coordinates at the Info Centre (close to where we started) are: 45.490804, -65.308758

The Parkway was built very recently. Sections of it opened in 2020, and the remaining connector from Alma opened in June of 2022. A number of gravel and borrow pits were needed during the construction phase, and our work involved the remediation of several of these areas, adding trees so the leveled pits will be eventually be covered with forest again. In addition to the visual value of obscuring the landscape scars, there are also the obvious benefits of increasing carbon sequestration and providing additional habitat for birds and other animals. Basically, several goals aligned with the work that we carried out. The following graphic shows the approximate locations for the new seedlings that we've planted so far:

Altogether, our planting team added 20,199 trees to the Parkway with this first phase of the project! Some of the gravel pits were still in operation when we were planting, but we'll be able to revisit those additional areas in the future, as they get decommissioned.

Here are a few photos of the planting team in action:

This project went very smoothly, despite heavy rains when we were planting. We were able to complete the planned planting on a significant number of the targeted areas within this park. We are scheduled to complete the remainder of the openings in 2023 or 2024. We also expect to return at some point in the near future to add some additional hardwood seedlings to the same areas. Naturally, we will also be making regular visits back to monitor the long-term growth and health of the planted trees.

We'd like to thank the staff at NB Parks (especially Josh & Devin) for helping make this project work, and again want to thank the Trees For Life organization for being the sponsor that made this work possible.

You can see more photos of our 2022 tree planting work on this site by going to our public 2022 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "Fundy Trail Parkway" sub-folder.

If you'd like to learn more about the Fundy Trail Parkway, visit their web page:

www.fundytrailparkway.com

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

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!

Tree Planting Project at New River Beach Provincial Park, New Brunswick (2022)

Our organization did some tree planting work at New River Beach Provincial Park this past September. This work was funded entirely by the Trees For Life organization as the Project Sponsor.

This provincial park is located in southwest New Brunswick, only about a thirty minute drive from the US border. Here's an overview graphic, courtesy of Google Earth:

The approximate GPS coordinates at the park entrance are: 45.136406, -66.529329

New River Beach Provincial Park is a very scenic park, overlooking a beautiful beach. When we were working in the park, there was a film crew on the beach below us, shooting an episode of Race Against The Tide, hosted by none other than Maestro Fresh Wes.

Most of the planned planting for this particular project involved planting tree seedlings where the Park staff wanted to improve visual buffers between camping sites (with existing sporadic mature trees). We also planted a few trees between the cliff edge and the fence over looking the beach. There was also a large empty field which the Park staff wants to turn into a mature stand of trees. This latter goal was important for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation, and will provide additional habitat for birds and wildlife. Basically, several goals aligned with the work that we carried out. The following graphic shows the approximate locations for the new seedlings:

Altogether, our planting team added 16,105 trees to the Park this year!

Here are a few photos of the planting team in action:

This project went very smoothly. We were able to complete the planned planting on all of the targeted areas within this park. We expect to return at some point in the near future to add some additional hardwood seedlings to the same areas. Naturally, we will also be making regular visits back to monitor the long-term growth and health of the planted trees.

We'd like to thank the staff at NB Parks (especially Josh & Ryan) for helping make this project work, and again want to thank the Trees For Life organization for being the sponsor that made this work possible.

You can see more photos of our 2022 tree planting work on this site by going to our public 2022 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "New River Beach Provincial Park" sub-folder.

If you'd like to learn more about New River Beach Provincial Park, visit their web page:

parcsnbparks.info/en/parks/13/new-river-beach-provincial-park

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

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!