This past Fall (2025), Replant.ca Environmental finished the fourth phase of our long-term tree planting project at Mactaquac Provincial Park. The work that we did in 2025 was made possible by support from Forests Canada (formerly known as Forests Ontario), and their ongoing Forest Recovery Canada program.
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.
We had already done work in this park in 2021, 2022, and 2024. This year, we were able to complete several more sections that we had not worked in previously, including doing some reclamation on the north and east sides of the major new lagoon treatment development area.
Some of the planting for this site involves planting
tree seedlings in fairly open areas, where the Parks team is turning
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 is also some underplanting at lower densities 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:
In total, our team added 29,435 more trees to this provincial park in 2025!
You can see more photos of our tree planting work at this site by visiting our Planting Photos folder on Dropbox, then going into the "2025 Planting Photos" folder, then into the "Mactaquac Provincial Park" sub-folder. Start here:
www.replant-environmental.ca/photos
We'd like to thank Kevin (the Park Manager) and Rob and their staff for their hospitality and support while we were on site. We definitely look forward to returning in 2026 to continue the work that Forests Canada 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.
