We seek peace in our own lives through meditation and the study of the Dharma (the traditional Buddhist teachings). We contribute to peace in our communities through ecological restoration, as a remedy for some of the violence done by development.
At our Wild Plant Nursery and the field sites that it serves, we work to conserve the native plant communities of the greater Washington region, home to one of the richest floras in eastern North America. Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola is conserving the forests of central Hispaniola, the richest surviving remnant of the Caribbean forest biome, a global biodiversity hotspot.
We see ecological restoration as essential to conservation because many natural areas are now too small and isolated to persist over the long term in their current state. In the greater Washington region, we are reestablishing forests and meadows on degraded sites. In central Hispaniola, our Tree Bank farmers are replanting native forest on their lands.
Click on the map picture at right to view a map showing many of our field sites in the Washington, DC, area. To learn more about a particular site, click on its site marker. Markers show their names when you move your mouse over them.
Please note that some of the map files are large and may not work well without broadband access to the internet.
How Current Is the Map?
This map was created for the previous version of our web site. It has not been updated for the current site, which launched at the end of August 2011, because our on-line mapping capability is likely to improve considerably over the course of the current web site’s first year, and we didn’t want to waste effort with an interim revision. In the map’s current form, coverage extends through the end of 2009. We hope to update photos and descriptions in spring or summer 2012.
What the Map Shows
The map shows 26 field and schoolyard sites in the DC area. It does not show our Wild Plant Nursery, nor, for the most part, does it show sites planted with our nursery stock by our partner agencies and organizations. Some of our own planting sites have been omitted as well, just because it was impractical to include every single planting. The map is intended to be representative but not exhaustive.
There are no DC-Area Map updates at present.
What You Can Learn about the Sites
Each site marker is linked to a photo presentation or to one of our standard web pages if the site in question has a standard page dedicated to it. Just click on a marker to follow the link. (Of course, the site markers are not to scale.)
The photo presentations contain both “Before” and “After” photos. The Before photos show the site as it was when we began work on it; the After photos show the site at the end of the 2009 growing season. (We hope to update the After photos in fall 2011; see the Overview tab of this page.) In so far as possible, the After photos are shot from the same perspective as the Before photos; when that proved impractical, the After photos show the same area but from a different perspective.
Photo presentations of small sites may contain only a single set of photos. Presentations of larger sites contain multiple sets. The number of sets is indicated below the Before photo; no number indicates that the presentation contains just one set. Within a presentation, the photo sets display, one after another, automatically.
A brief site description appears below the After photos. The description appraises the site on the basis of seedling survival, the presence of invasive alien vegetation, deer browsing, mowing encroachment, and sometimes other factors as well. A brief suggestion regarding management priorities is also usually included.
The presentations make no attempt to disguise occasional failures or disappointments—on the contrary, we think it vital to our long-term success that problems be recognized for what they are. Progress does not usually come easily on our sites; if it did, we probably wouldn’t be there in the first place.
The Background Map
The background map was created from two copyright-free sources. The topographic presentation is from the USDI National Atlas of the United States. The dark green patches that overlie the topo map come from the USGS National Map Seamless Server and show forest canopy in 2001. (The canopy has declined since then.)
Our DC-Area Field Map contains photos and descriptions of 26 field and schoolyard sites. To explore them, just click on the image above.