Key Results in 2010
Tree Bank / Hispaniola
We bought a used pickup truck and put it to work at our Tree Bank Nursery, located in the northwest of the Dominican Republic, along the border with Haiti. The truck has extended our planting range and greatly improved the management of the nursery itself, since supplies are now much easier to bring in.
After more than two years of effort, we succeeded in incorporating our Tree Bank partner organization, the Asociación de Productores de Bosques, Los Cerezos. On the strength of this new official status, we started work on a coffee export program. (In our project region, coffee is grown almost exclusively in the shade, so coffee sales will be a good way to add value to forest canopy.)
We raised enough money to start our Tree Bank credit program—$15,400—but setting up the program proved more complicated than we expected and we weren’t able to make our first loans in 2010. We hope to do that in 2011.
We continued to expand the areas planted in native forest, by planting portions of our five most recently enrolled farms. By year-end, the total area planted in native trees had reached nearly 14 acres—modest but solid progress.
Washington, DC, Region
We distributed about 5,000 native, local-ecotype trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants from our Wild Plant Nursery to local parks and schoolyards. For additional 2010 developments at our DC-area nursery, see the Wild Plant Nursery page (or use this link to go directly to the Wild Plant Nursery 2010 Review.)
We signed a contract with Fairfax County, Virginia, for the provision of local-ecotype native plants—the first such contract in the County’s history. We consider this an important regional precedent because Fairfax County is so large. (Fairfax County covers about 400 square miles, is home to over a million residents, and has a budget of $3.3 billion.)
We signed a contract with the US Fish and Wildlife Service for the management of 12.5 acres of grassland at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, in Prince William County, Virginia. The project is intended to control invasive alien plants and improve grassland bird habitat.
We launched our first three meadow restoration projects. Meadow restoration is technically complex and we will probably fumble along for several years before we manage much, but this capability, if we can develop it, will greatly extend the benefits that we bring to local natural areas. Our new meadow projects are small; each is under an acre. Two are on Fairfax County parkland—one is at Waples Mill Park, in the Difficult Run drainage; the other is at Rutherford Park, along Long Branch Stream in the Accotink Creek drainage. The third is at the BLM’s Meadowood Recreation Area, for which see the next entry.
At Meadowood, on the Mason Neck Peninsula in southeastern Fairfax County, we continued our work on two pasture sites, amounting to just under 5 acres, where we have been reestablishing forest and woody old-field communities since 2008. (Woody oldfield is basically meadow on its way back to forest; this community type is important habitat for many plants and animals but is increasingly rare in our region.) We also launched the meadow restoration project mentioned in the previous entry.
At the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, we extended our restoration areas by about another acre of forest in all; by year-end, the total area under management was probably approaching 5 acres. We also conducted a series of test-plot trials as part of a long-term effort to find cheaper ways to control invasive alien thicket and invasive alien groundlayer in forest.
We planted, weeded, and extended 10 Fairfax County stream-buffer sites (including the two Fairfax County meadow sites mentioned above).
As part of a brook trout restoration project run by Trout Unlimited, we planted two buffer sites along the Thornton River in Rappahannock County, Virginia. Eventually, the plantings will shade the water, helping to keep it cool enough for trout.
In our school greening activities, we supplied plants, and some advice, to eight schools.