Don't feel like rambling too much here but after taking a class (Ecosystem Restoration Design) last year that touched on this method a few notes:
- Yes, you generally try to use native species only. Search for things like the WWF ecoregions map to get a broad idea, search for a local resource on native species.
- The reason it grows a bit faster isn't magic - it involves a higher input effort/cost, and you skip a stage of succession by focusing more on planting 'keystone species' rather than going through an initial stage of 'pioneer species'.
- Because of this, they tend to be more attractive in urban environments. See also related organizations like "tiny forests" https://www.ivn.nl/tiny-forest/tiny-forest-worldwide (netherlands), https://theotherdada.com (beirut), more listed on https://www.afforestt.com/about. You do need a minimum width/length to implement, and may need to dig the soil/amend the soil to deal with urban-area compaction.
- The most actionable things you can do is:
- got money? Right now (temperate winter here) is a good time to plant native saplings if they're not sold out. You may even find some folks 'salvaging' native plants from areas where land is about to be cleared for construction.
- setup a tree nursery. Native saplings can be expensive
- try things in a small way, tell your neighbors, start mutual learning.
- Keep in mind not all areas in the world should be planted with trees. Some areas are natively grasslands and thus trees are less populated.
- If you're going to have a dense forest, you need a plan for maintenance so you don't end up with woody mass building up to cause a fire later on (see millan millan's papers "greening and browning in a climate change hotspot". You might be able to partner with a local businesses, school, government, etc. to find a spot & help with expenses/maintenance
I'm considering a few hundred acres of mountainous clearcut land in the pacific northwest. Are there any resources you'd recommend to learn about replanting non-urban areas?
The best option might be to get in touch with your local university forestry extension, for example: https://forestry.wsu.edu/
Another resource would be your local USDA office. The NRCS should be available to provide free site-specific technical assistance (e.g. for soil regeneration and conservation planning). There are also zillions of loan/grant/easement/conservation payment programs that the USDA runs: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/prog...
Beware that the USDA will typically not provide good advice if you aren't planning on using land for resources like harvesting lumber/crops/animal husbandry.
If you want to restore a local ecosystem you'll need to reach out to another organization, probably an NGO, to figure out how to proceed in a reasonable manner. The biggest group that would probably help would be the Nature Conservancy.
So, NRCS is a division of the USDA focused heavily on conservation. I know this from experience because we have some of our land in a conservation program through NRCS, and they’re super knowledgeable about native ecosystems.
I'll second talking to a local nonprofit over the USDA or USFS. At least in the PNW, these agencies are focused on extracting value from the land and their replantings are tightly-packed monocultures designed to be harvested again. They have about as much in common with a forest as a golf course has with a prairie.
I was going to add that consulting a nonprofit (like the Nature Conservancy) would be a good idea as well. But why either or? If I were undertaking a project as large as reforesting several hundred acres of land, I’d want to consult as many sources as possible. USDA has field offices in almost every county, not to mention loan (including easy-to-qualify-for microloans of <$50K) and payment programs to help with capital and expenses.
Genuine question—are “tightly-packed monocultures” that are recurrently harvested optimal (from a carbon removal perspective) under some conditions? Similarly, if you inherit a mature forest, is it optimal to harvest some portion of it so that new trees can absorb carbon?
Certainly! After rereading my comment I can see how it comes off as unduly harsh on the aforementioned federal agencies.
However given the context of the article and the question of replanting a clearcut in the PNW, I'm guessing the intent is to create a forest with a sustainable and vibrant ecosystem. That intent puts it at odds of the forestry practices that favors harvesting trees for economic value.
There's certainly a need for timber in modern society, but the way that's achieved doesn't create a forest or an environment that fosters a well-balanced ecological system.
All the stories I hear add up to the USDA basically being pound-for-pound the worst federal agency. (DoD is bad, but so much bigger, and has redeeming bits like DARPA. I don't know of any redeeming bits in USDA off hand.)
I'm curious as to why you decided to look into purchasing a clearcut in order to better understand if this is popular amongst a demographic such as tech workers with growing wealth--is there a market for this specifically in consulting forestry with a tech focus. Check out the Society of American Foresters if you want to pay for a forest management plan. Or as noted try the local forestry extension and the Forest Service's State and Private Forestry contacts.
Because the ratio of land to cost was better. And because right now Weyerhaueser owns a ton of timberland up here but won't part with it until after they've harvested it.
In my mind, returning some land to natural forest and placing a small spot to go camping or hiking through it would be an incredible gift to future generations.
This is something I have in mind for the future as well, although it’s a little ways off financially. I wonder if there are organizations that coordinate these sorts of things, aiming for contiguous areas for example.
There are, but I think they typically serve as clearinghouses that acquire land and then hand it to the federal government. I think it's less common to find individuals buying up plots to conserve them.
+1 to the NRCS route. We went through them for our oak woodland and upland prairie restoration projects, and they have been really great to work with. They care a lot about the environment and have a lot of knowledge.
Consider the aspects of both social and ecological restoration, land acknowledgement, land 'ownership'. If you're doing non-urban areas and attempting housing, think about the different framings of Wildlife Urban Interface (WUI). Note excerpt:
"
See also [[Millán Millán]] paper Greening and Browning in a Climate Change Hotspot: The Mediterranean Basin which delves into this too.
interesting paper, talks about wildlife-urban interface (reminded me of https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314 from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/opinion/sunday/california-fires.html ) but notably the urban population living near it...
"This is occurring in an area where human population is increasing—especially the urban population (i.e., people not living from the land) in the wildland–urban interface (Modugno et al. 2016)." main reaction is that I/we need to be trained to go through that transformation in living with land."
A good place to source trees is “Go Natives” in Richmond Beach. I went there this summer and they had hundreds of cedars and a great selection of native plants of all kinds.
I’ve been thinking about something similar one day. Buy a tract of land and just let it return to its native form with some help from me. Are there any obvious legal or financial pitfalls or hints you’ve gathered?
>Because of this, they tend to be more attractive in urban environments. See also related organizations...
I participated in one of the projects in Bengaluru, India. I no longer live there, but I've seen photos/videos - they are lovely. See https://www.saytrees.org/miyawaki for more details.
On a similar topic, 10 years ago, a couple of friends and I led a replantation drive in a 2 acre patch of land (a portion of a larger degraded area slated for replantation with the help of the government and NGOs) near a dried up lake in India.
Instead of the usual mass mono culture plantations that are cost effective and easily doable, we decided to do something different. Here's a couple of things we did:
1. Use native species
2. Instead of a blanket plantation of rows of trees, landscape a more natural habitat. This included, a dense canopy, a meadow and some sparce shrubbery all on different areas of the lot.
3. Include plants that provide food and shelter for native fauna, even if the plants weren't native.
4. Landscape a little to allow for water retention
5. Focus on soil improvement in the beginning
We did a few more things to ensure high survival rate, but that's probably not of interest. The results were amazing. Our section was the one with the most promising results. Our lot grew like a natural habitat in the 2nd and 3rd year in a way that you'd never feel that this was a barren piece of land. And eventually, some of the species started spreading to the nearby lots as well. The other lots didn't do so well, some of them had survival rate of about 30-40%, but a lot of them ended up more like less than 10%. Mind you, we are talking about 40C+ summer temperatures.
Of course, beyond the fact that we used plants that survive in the weather here's a couple more:
1. We tilled the land (burying whatever dead plant material was above it), almost the entire lot. High temperatures tends to harden the top soil and therefore increase water run off during the rainy season. Tilling ensures higher water absorption when it rains.
2. We amended the soil just around each of the planted saplings with coconut coir and cow dung because the soil was really degraded, devoid of much organic matter.
3. The way we would plant each tree would be that the sapling at the center, with a depression in the soil around it followed by a small bund around the depression, and some hardy shrubs/ground cover on the bund. During the rainy season, this collects a lot of water and retains it for the roots for a longer time, and once the dry season kicks in, even if there's no water at the surface, the shrubs around the bund kind of prevent direct sunlight from hitting the ground, thereby retaining moisture even in the dry season.
4. For the first year we had to ensure we water the plants till they take root and can sustain themselves, especially during the summer. We couldn't set up a drip irrigation system, nor could we flood the surface with water. We instead buried clay pots in the ground around the plants and would fill them with water regularly during the summer. The clay pots release water slowly into the ground throughout the day, and since the pots were covered with a lid after filling up, water loss to evaporation was minimal. The plants would get water directly at the roots in a slow and steady manner.
This 99% Invisible podcast episode talks about the unintended consequences of planting trees in the peat tundra of Scotland spurred by the British government's tax breaks to incentivize re-forestation around the country in the 1980s:
EDIT: This is not to say that trees should not be planted. I wrote the post in support of using science and nuance to plant trees the right way, which I think is the major point of the article.
> The seedlings are planted very densely—20,000 to 30,000 per hectares as opposed to 1,000 per hectare in commercial forestry. For a period of two to three years, the site is monitored, watered, and weeded, to give the nascent forest every chance to establish itself.
Any planting of new forest is to be applauded, but(at least where I live) this is an unrealistic approach.
We have 10 acres (about 4 acres) of land that we have mostly replanted. I've learnt a bit in the process.
1) watering everything is not feasible. We're on tank water, and each summer ends with me policing the lengths of family showers. This southern hemisphere summer, we added one more 25kl tank (several $k) just for plant watering. It barely scratches the surface.
2) weeding is unpleasant and hard work.I struggle to get any help with it. In practice, spraying is the only practical approach, not ideal environmentally.
3) the profile of species that thrive is changing, right before our eyes last summer was brutal and we lost several big trees probably 50+years old in the heat.
While this article's approach is an interesting one, I would say it's is suited to a very compact environment, such as one might find in japan.
At a larger scale, a less intensive approach is to plant semi-intensively mainly in pioneer species. Planted in the autumn or spring, these will survive without watering.
These form a thick forest that prevents weed growth underneath. You have now reached a stable point - you can now leave your forest to nature. Birds will drop seeds, and those seeds will germinate beneath the pioneer canopy, letting the larger species come through and eventually replace the pioneer species.
If you want you can accelerate the process by planting large trees here and there within the pioneer canopy. But again, that won't require watering or weeding.
Key to it is using native species, and picking species that will survive at higher temperatures.
Being in the southern hemisphere, that means species that are commonly found in the north, where it is hotter already.
There is some interesting thinking to be done on "native" versus "adapted" when it comes to planning new forest. It's a reality that the climate is changing and there are many introduced pest species that are all drastically changing the landscapes. On the Pacific coast, the combination of drought, sudden oak death disease and pine beetles are rapidly changing the flora and also the fauna when food and shelter disappears.
When you plant a new forest today, do you try to preserve the native species or do you anticipate what species will thrive in the area 20-50 years from now?
Yes, this is something larger groups are starting to realize and try to work with. Look up the Nature Conservancy's climate change corridors.
They are trying to preserve/conserve land in strips as a priority. This way as climate changes, plants and animals will have a path to migrate unimpeded (or at least impeded less than if there were large roads/developments in the way!).
That's a fascinating question. We hear a lot of talk about planting forests to combat climate change.
But it seems very feasible that just planting whatever is thriving today will backfire in 20 years time when that species becomes unviable due to temperature rise, reduced rainfall or arrival of some exotic bio pest.
> Birds will drop seeds, and those seeds will germinate beneath the pioneer canopy, letting the larger species come through and eventually replace the pioneer species.
FYI This can actually be a huge problem if you live in Washington State, because Himalayan Blackberry spreads through bird droppings. You have to aggressively weed it or it will choke out everything else in the area within a matter of years, including saplings, mature brush, grass, native blackberry, and other invasives like Scotch Broom.
That blackberry is an insane (kind of scary) species. It grows so fast and has immortal roots that will just sprout up somewhere else. Huge thorns to protect itself from animals and people, delicious big berries to help it propagate. How do you even try to outcompete that as a plant?
I am confused. There are a host of different methods in creating a forest depending on the end goal. If the goal is to generate more board-feet of lumber you do A. If the goal is to sequester carbon you do B. If you want to promote animal life you do C. If you want to promote particular plants/trees you do D. Of course you can balance these interests, but you cannot maximize all at once. What exactly is the end goal of the Miyawaki Method? What does the finished forest look like?
From the article:
"A high level of diversity is paramount on Sharma’s list of essential goals. In projects Afforestt has undertaken in India, his company so far managed to use about 336 types of native trees out of 2800 that are known to have existed in the country. And the company has started its own nursery in Rajasthan to begin to add more species to their plantings.
Sharma is adamant that the impact of even very small forests on local communities is significant enough to matter. Research from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which found increased fungi, bacteria, pollinators, and amphibians on two tiny planted forest sites in urban Zaanstad that were based on Sharma’s models,, lends some scientific credence to this claim."
In this case, it would seem end goal is fauna/flora diversity.
>> on two tiny planted forest sites in urban Zaanstad
Ok. But that is where the debates start. Many forests will not lend themselves towards diversity. Look at places like the pacific coastal rain forests. If left alone they will become a homogenous zone, one canopy of trees. Clearcutting strips increases diversity of tree/bush cover, helping small animals and everything that feeds on them. Diversity over and above the "natural" untouched state. So is the goal a natural level of diversity, or an artificially elevated diversity for diversity's sake?
I think you need to look a bit closer at the pacific coastal rain forests. Even if you had a tree monoculture (which you don't), the amount and number of lichen and moss on untouched, old or even second growth trees is exhorbitant. Those in turn host a huge variety of other organisms.
The number of edible natives is also respectable, and those didn't come from nowhere. They were here all the time in those 'homogenous' zones.
I lived in that area for years. And i said homegenous canopy, not monoculture. The blanket canopy works for certain trees, but not for all and certainly not for all animals. Birds like eagles cannot hunt through forrests. Deer dont get as much to eat with diminished sunlight getting to the ground. The edges of clearcuts, the transition from apex canopy to bare soil in the cut, are the most diverse and animal-friendly zones of that forest.
I think part of the problem here is just lack of age. If fully grown western red cedar falls, it will strike other trees, knocking them down or shearing them off on one side, weakening one of those and potentially setting up a game of dominoes that takes three centuries to play out.
That cedar will lie on the forest floor for decades, hardly decaying (or rather, it would if we stopped meddling). No new cedars will grow in that spot quickly, but hemlock may root on the side of the trunk, fifteen feet off the ground in the moss. Between the precarious perch and hemlock being hemlock, that tree will die in turn, creating a new opening that might contain cedar again.
FWIW, my limited understanding is that initially, in Japan, the focus was on restoring the native forests, conserving Japanese species and ecosystems.
> So is the goal a natural level of diversity, or an artificially elevated diversity for diversity's sake?
I favor E. O. Wilson's proposal that we set aside half the Earth as a nature preserve and more-or-less let evolution do it's thing. Which half is, of course, an open question, eh?
One way or another, I doubt we can avoid continent-scale ecological management.
Which half is always this problem. It's compounded by the fact that Europeans have scourged their land of anything worthwhile - relegating nature to tiny preserves and replacing most wilderness with farms and cities. Often these same people insist that other nations avoid developing and "preserve" their land. How about we raze Europe's cities and give half her land back to Nature first.
Diversity does not have to be a static or micro thing, along any dimension. E.g. temporal or spatial. If you look on a larger scale, there was/is species diversity across centuries/aeons (evolution, Ice Ages, ...) and across hundreds or thousands of square km. Could be a large homogeneous patch of 500 sq. km. next to another 300 in size next to a large or medium heterogeneous patch, and so on. On a larger scale, that's still diversity.
You almost answered your own question by mentioning "balance" -- the primary goal is self-regulating stability. This is an approach which uses intensive (and expensive) horticultural methods to quickly create a patch of forest that will require no further human management or operating expense.
The biodiversity should increase a little bit as local fauna habituate and immigrate to the forest, bringing with them propagules from other native species, so humans don't have to do all the work.
Specific benefits of the Miyawaki method are that it can dovetail well with common urban practices. A small forest can grow next to concrete buildings, roads and sidewalks, and offer all the common "green building" benefits such as fire suppression, improved thermal regulation, and runoff absorption. Of course, there will be wildlife as well. Some people consider it a nuisance for whatever reason.
M.R. Hari in Kerala has done some experiments with "eccentrifying" (my word, not his) Miyawaki forests into types such as a edible- or flower- dominated forests, which the mix of such species is slightly increased, but not enough to disrupt the ecological balance. I recommend his YouTube channel 'Crowd Foresting' for many examples of what these forests can look like (in his particular location).
Any ecologist would tell you that trees plant themselves if left alone. The real question is not how to get people to plant trees, it's how to get people to leave trees and the areas where they will grow alone.
That's in the majority of places where trees would normally grow. Of course in some ecosystems like a full desert, we can help nature do it's thing. And we can also help along the natural process by selectively planting additional species. In the US tree planting is about foresty not nature or the environment. Forestry is the planting and managing trees for economic gain, usually for pulp or lumber often by planting only one or two species.
So, another misleading thing would be that forestry involves planting several times as many trees and then weeding, culling, thinning out the trees. So one misleading statistic you will find is something like "we planted 1 million trees", where the actual number of trees finally will be something like 100,000.
Trees come with their own built in reproductive system via seeds, acorn and the like. The urge to plant forests is a human urge to meddle and fix things. This urge is also the reason why the forests were cleared and nature curtailed. This urge should, in most of the world, be resisted if we are to let nature do it's own thing.
Trees are planted in urban environments all the time. In this kind of environment, "leaving it alone" is unfortunately not an option, although I agree it would be best for the trees.
The Miyawaki method presents a stark alternative to the recommendations of the International Society of Arboriculture, with many benefits.
Maybe people want a Miyawaki forest in a city to help with runoff, air quality, and temperature regulation.
On the other hand, maybe people prefer sparsely placed trees which don't obscure their views of road signs and intersections, or provide shade over a lawn for congregation.
Forests shape their own local climate. A deforested area can often not reforest itself successfully because the local climate changes sufficiently to be unsuitable to native tree species.
The Amazonian rainforest is a good example of this. If we destroy just a little more of it, the local climate will change so that the remaining rainforest will die and turn into grasslands.
Planted also doesn't mean 'survived'. You plant these trees among disturbed soil and broken branches. The trees left behind are supposed to harbor species that will repopulate, but those species are used to the water levels and shade of the closed canopy, and now they're in the middle of a hellscape that won't recover for decades, only to be chopped down again.
Even if the trees are fit for the local ecology, they're now in a very bad microbiome and not all will make it.
the 'random mix' and monoculture points in here are the topic of the first chapter of Seeing Like a State, the book about why institutions over-simplify the societies they govern
it's a good book, especially as an introduction to why reductionism and quantitative measurement distort what they measure when taken apart from holism and qualitative valuation - but boy is it a slow burner. I listened to it on audiobook during my commute and I'm surprised I didn't fall asleep at the wheel.
I'm a bigger proponent for agroforestry than other methods. Being that monocultures are the biggest catalyst of desertification, agroforestry, when implemented in industrial agricultural settings, has a higher dimensionality/impact.
I did not scientifically measure this, but anecdotes are a good place to start for grant applications, so I'll mention it anyway.
I'm trying to turn a compacted field back into a tiny woodland. It's still mostly horizontal at this point, but it's full of pillbugs and spiders and earthworms and the birds seem to love foraging in it. An hour ago I looked out the window and saw a finch pulling a spider off the side of my house, and it reminded me that one of the supposed tenets of polycultures is that you build up the food web and the food web will take care of the pests. Then it reminded me that I don't recall seeing this many birds the previous year.
I've temporarily drawn in the bird population from the surrounding area, by providing a richer hunting ground (more carrying capacity). Next year there will be a few more baby birds surviving to adulthood, then they'll be competing aggressively for all the other invertebrates in the area, dropping more fruit seeds everywhere they perch, which means more bugs and fruit and so on.
The details are what set this method apart. The myriad ways of rejuvenating fallow soil, planting on clusters of mounds, planting 30x denser than accepted practice, the idea that a forest can be just 4m wide and so on ...
It's quality over quantity. Forests tend to recover from the edges. If you spread all of your available resources over a hectare of land, you get something better but not good. If instead you dumped all of those resources into six squares, they get closer to healthy faster and then begin to spread.
I've heard others opine that if we forced foresters to leave a large intact area in the middle of a clearcut, that the land would recover faster. I don't doubt it. I think we could accomplish the same by making them take out narrower strips. It's just not 'convenient' and so they won't unless we force them.
- Yes, you generally try to use native species only. Search for things like the WWF ecoregions map to get a broad idea, search for a local resource on native species.
- The reason it grows a bit faster isn't magic - it involves a higher input effort/cost, and you skip a stage of succession by focusing more on planting 'keystone species' rather than going through an initial stage of 'pioneer species'. - Because of this, they tend to be more attractive in urban environments. See also related organizations like "tiny forests" https://www.ivn.nl/tiny-forest/tiny-forest-worldwide (netherlands), https://theotherdada.com (beirut), more listed on https://www.afforestt.com/about. You do need a minimum width/length to implement, and may need to dig the soil/amend the soil to deal with urban-area compaction.
- The most actionable things you can do is:
- Keep in mind not all areas in the world should be planted with trees. Some areas are natively grasslands and thus trees are less populated.- If you're going to have a dense forest, you need a plan for maintenance so you don't end up with woody mass building up to cause a fire later on (see millan millan's papers "greening and browning in a climate change hotspot". You might be able to partner with a local businesses, school, government, etc. to find a spot & help with expenses/maintenance