NEWS tion programmes Greenpop ultimately aims to “ plant 500,000 trees to restore degraded forest areas , increase biodiversity and expand ecosystem services across sub-Saharan Africa by 2025 ”, says Gauld-Angelucci , who explains that the essence of these projects is to view forests as a holistic part of the landscape .
“ A forest does not just sit there by itself and not interact with anything around it . There are animals and communities that rely on forests and legislation that determines use rights ; there is also neighbouring vegetation that has to be taken into consideration .”
The first step in restoring any degraded landscape is to determine why the site became degraded in the first place , which means studying factors such as threats to a particular landscape to establish whether it would make a good candidate for restoration .
Gauld-Angelucci says obvious markers of degradation include when a site is devoid of vegetation but there are visible tree stumps indicating that trees have either been cut down or burnt or where the landscape is suffering from a high degree of erosion .
Another marker of degradation is a high prevalence of alien invasive plants . “ You could have a piece of land covered in trees and vegetation but it does not mean that it is healthy because it could be that those are alien species and are posing a risk to indigenous vegetation because they are a very high fire risk .”
It is a complex , lengthy and delicate process and “ we [ Greenpop ] would never show up at a piece of land and say , ‘ hey , this looks like a good place to plant a whole bunch of trees ’”.
Greenpop runs its restoration projects with local community organisations and partners where it receives applications from landowners and community organisations asking for help to restore a piece of land that has been degraded over time due to a number of reasons .
The next steps include determining what vegetation the site should be restored to and appropriate methods .
“ This is an incredibly complex step and you have to approach it from multiple angles ,” says Gauld-Angelucci , explaining that the main way Greenpop determines the history of any degraded site is through Biodiversity Geographic Information System maps provided by the National Biodiversity Institute . These show the indigenous ecosystems for every part of South Africa .
“ You can zoom in and determine whether an area was once Afromontane forest or Cape Flats Sand Fynbos , for example . This is usually a really good method to determine what type of vegetation the land was covered with before it was degraded .”
Sometimes , however , the land can be a “ mosaic area ”.
“ This means the landscape can support forest as well as fynbos and what probably happened in the past was the forest and the fynbos lived next to each other in patches and then the fynbos would catch on fire and some of the forest would burn down and then there wouldn ’ t be a fire for a while and some
Figure 2 . Greenpop ultimately aims to plant 500,000 trees to restore degraded forest areas , increase biodi versity and expand ecosystem services across sub-Saharan Africa by 2025 . ( Image : Unsplash / Steven Kamena )
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