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
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.
