Replant.ca Environmental: treeplanters

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Tree Planting in Mactaquac Provincial Park, New Brunswick (2025)

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

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.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Volunteer Day at the Walker Road Demonstration Forest (2022)

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!

- Jonathan Clark