We Forest

I'm not satisfied with simpaly donating to help reforest a far off land. I want to help my local bioregion. This is my plan, help me out with ideas.

1. Find a place that I either have premission to reforest or I will not get into trubble for reforesting. In my area there are deposites of red clay that look like Mars in the middle of wilderness. I'm sure no one would mind if I fix that.

2. Make top soil . Composting will work. I will borrow pine staw and leaves from the surrounding forest to make a thick bed of compost. This will take some time to decompose but I'd say with in a year I can start planting local grasses.

3. In year 2 I can start planting hardy trees. A great option for my area is white pine.

4. When the white pine grow they will provide shade and drop pine staw to further increase the furtility of the soil. The surrounding forest can do the rest of the work.

My plan is easy. It is simpaly filling holes in an already forested area. I don't have to import anything and the surroundeding forest will do most of the work. My plan can not fail aslong as I use local plants.

This is technicly not creating a forest, but the same concept can be applied to a feild. Making top soil will be easyer, but you will have to plant all the plants.

If you plan to do this, make sure that anything you plant is native to the area. They will grow better and the wild life is aleady adapted to live among them. Introducing plants can end up dammaging your bioregion.

If you have any tips please post them.

Wow, no one is on here. I hope everyone is too busy with reforistation.

Mario, sorry for such a slow reply! Where are you in the world? The steps taken to reforest a place depend a lot on the place, the current state of the land, and the availability of indigenous seed to the site (without your help).

If I were you, I would look at what nature would do if you didn't do it, and try to speed up that process (stacking functions, stacking time). Try to get lots of organic matter (in basically any form) in there and spread it on the ground. It doesn't need to be composted. Then plant in the shrubs, legumes, and other small trees that would come up first. Once you have this process going, you could come back in a couple years and put in some more climax (dynamic equilibrium) species, or just let nature do it from there. If you are in the tropics, the thing will take off and before you know it you have a fully stratisfied forest!

A helpful resource to check out, especially for wet/dry tropics is call forru (Forest Restoration and Rehabilitation Unit) out of Chiang Mai Unversity in Northern Thailand. You can download their book:

How to Plant a Forest
here:
http://www.forru.org/FORRUEng_Website/Pages/engpublications.htm

I hope that helps, and thanks for replanting!

Christian Shearer
Panya Project and Terra Genesis