In search of 20,000,000 trees.

PhantomWolf

Penultimate Amazing
PhantomWolf
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Those that are on YouTube might have seen this already, but if you haven't, let me tell you about #TeamTrees.

So MrBeast, a YouTube creator hit 20 million subs a short while back, and as a way to celebrate he and Mark Rober have partnered with a huge number of other creators to form TeamTrees with the goal of planting 20 million trees before the end of the year. They are doing this by working with Arbor Day Foundation who are going to plant one tree for every $1 raised.

This is pretty much blowing up, and within a few days of being announced they have hit over $8.6 million with Elon Musk dropping a million dollars in the pot, Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, donating $150,000, and YouTube pledging to match the next $1 Million raised on its platform (it's at just over $2.1 million currently.)

There are plenty of videos about the push and some are quite interesting if you don't know a lot about trees.






If you're interested in looking into it more their site is https://www.teamtrees.org/ or you can look up #teamtress on Youtube

What do you think? Seems to be a pretty good idea, and I expect that they're going to surpass the 20 million, and while it won't stop Climate Change, this does have the potential of being able to take 10,000 tons of Carbon from the atmosphere each year, so hey, just 39,999,990,000 tons to go. :D

So yeah, I know this is a little bit of a advert for them, but I think it's also an important current topic, and one that can be talked about as well as actioned if people think it's worth helping out.
 
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I can't listen to the audio right now.

What kind of trees exactly? It would have to be old growth forest type trees to make a noticeable difference I think.
 
Venom said:
I can't listen to the audio right now.

What kind of trees exactly? It would have to be old growth forest type trees to make a noticeable difference I think.
Click to expand...

It depends on where they are planted. The Arbor Foundation determines what trees are native to the area they are planting, and what will do well, since they want them to survive and mature, then plant a mix of those trees to make sure that they will thrive and that there is some diversity in the trees in the area.

More about them here

While based in the US, the Foundation plant trees all over the world, so the 20 million trees won't just be planted in the US and Canada.
 
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I have plugged it before but I will plug it again: There is a Berlin-based search engine that is good enough for most searches and spends the whole revenue it generates by ads etc through its users into planting trees. They claim to have planted 72.000.000 trees since they started, and it seems like the legal form they chose under German law would bring them into trouble if that claim isn't true. I switched to it as my default search engine some months ago and it is rare that I feel to have missed something and ask another search engine. Check it out:

https://info.ecosia.org/what
 
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Before anyone throws shade on this, 20,000,000 trees planted is an achievable goal. It's a big, difficult goal, but not insane.

For comparison, the U.S. Forest Service has a nursery in Nebraska that produces about 2.5 million seedlings a year, mostly for reforestation after logging operations or forest fires.

Lots of developing nations are pushing re-forestation. Lots of good work can be done here. They might be able to get this done by just adding funding to a lot of existing reforestation efforts, no need to reinvent the wheel.
 
crescent said:
They might be able to get this done by just adding funding to a lot of existing reforestation efforts, no need to reinvent the wheel.
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Yeah I agree, and I'm pretty sure that is why they decided to partner with the Arbor Foundation instead of going it alone. The AF was founded in 1972 so have been at it a while, and are currently attempting to have 100 million trees planted worldwide by 2022 for the 150th anniversary of Arbor Day, so the two goals line up really well.
 
I suggest planting them where Climate Change is going to bring the rain for them.
 
casebro said:
I suggest planting them where Climate Change is going to bring the rain for them.
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Yeah, they are doing that

However, trees also expire a lot of water from their leaves, about 95% of what they draw from the soils, and so when you get a lot of trees together they can actually create their own climate and rain. China is using this to start slowing the encroachment and reclaiming the southern parts of the Gobi Desert. Israel has also used it to convert desert in to arable lands.

ETA: It's also a reason the felling rain forests are so bad, by cutting down the trees, it destroys these climates and ends up reducing the rains, thus drying the rest out and killing more forest, which dries it out even more.
 
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PhantomWolf said:
Yeah, they are doing that

However, trees also expire a lot of water from their leaves, about 95% of what they draw from the soils, and so when you get a lot of trees together they can actually create their own climate and rain. China is using this to start slowing the encroachment and reclaiming the southern parts of the Gobi Desert. Israel has also used it to convert desert in to arable lands.

ETA: It's also a reason the felling rain forests are so bad, by cutting down the trees, it destroys these climates and ends up reducing the rains, thus drying the rest out and killing more forest, which dries it out even more.
Click to expand...


That is pretty much a boiled down description of how rainforests work - they literally create a local micro-climate, and the bigger they are the less "local" and "micro" that climate becomes. This is why cutting them down is a real danger to the planet.


Actually, planting masses of trees is great idea, because its young forests that are the most effective at using carbon.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/plant-more-trees-young-forests-use-carbon-most-effectively/
 
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I just purchased 50 trees. All power to these guys.

ETA Well I tried to. It wouldn’t accept my card number. I’ll send them an email.
 
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On a completely unrelated note, the Logging Company I consult for would like to know where exactly these trees are being planted.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
On a completely unrelated note, the Logging Company I consult for would like to know where exactly these trees are being planted.
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I was just reading an article on Tobi Lutke donating $1,000,001 dollars to pip Musk's donation, and it stated that all of the trees will be being planted outside of America, but I haven't seen anything else that would confirm that. I do know that the Arbor Day Foundation has projects worldwide though. I would also note, that they won't be being planted for later logging. The Arbor Foundation is about rebuilding native Forests, not planting pines for forestry.
 
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Strange turns in my life over the past 5 years have resulted in me somewhat accidentally owning a 40 acre forest on the Olympic Peninsula, WA state. I'm able to supply saplings in vast quantity. I hope to do just that when I move back west from my banishment to the American Redoubt. Anyone who lives in Western WA (who gives the appearance of being semi normal online) is welcome to come supply up.
 
varwoche said:
Anyone who lives in Western WA (who gives the appearance of being semi normal online) is welcome to come supply up.
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Well, that's me out, then.

Due to a strange set of circumstances, I ended up being part owner of a (very small chunk of) privately-held nature preserve in the Great Lakes region.

I like the idea of lots of people buying up small bits of land for that purpose, preserving or re-creating native habitat whenever possible.
 
They plant 20 million trees that would not have been planted otherwise. The question is where is the money coming from (and everything else) to look after the trees?
 
rjh01 said:
They plant 20 million trees that would not have been planted otherwise. The question is where is the money coming from (and everything else) to look after the trees?
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Many trees need little of no maintenance. Eucalyptus for example.
 
rjh01 said:
They plant 20 million trees that would not have been planted otherwise. The question is where is the money coming from (and everything else) to look after the trees?
Click to expand...

The Arbor Day Foundation are specialists in Restorative Forest planting, meaning that they go into an area where a lot of native forest has been cut down and along with the local Government and forestry partners, they replant the area with trees that are native to that area, both in and around the existing forests. Because they aren't just planting pine plantations everywhere, once planted the trees will mostly look after themselves just as those that weren't planted by the Foundation do.
 
PhantomWolf said:
The Arbor Day Foundation are specialists in Restorative Forest planting, meaning that they go into an area where a lot of native forest has been cut down and along with the local Government and forestry partners, they replant the area with trees that are native to that area, both in and around the existing forests. Because they aren't just planting pine plantations everywhere, once planted the trees will mostly look after themselves just as those that weren't planted by the Foundation do.
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Besides, the only trees that really do need "looking after" are plantation trees specifically planted for future logging... they at least need regular pruning

Rainforests have been looking after themselves for four hundred million years.
 
smartcooky said:
Besides, the only trees that really do need "looking after" are plantation trees specifically planted for future logging... they at least need regular pruning

Rainforests have been looking after themselves for four hundred million years.
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Only hope these trees do not meet the same fate as a lot of rainforest. That is cut down for wood, mining, and farmland. Might be ok in Australia or USA, but in poor countries anything can happen.

I only hope none of these trees need watering after planting.

Then trees are only part of the environment. What about the animals? Yes, forests of all types have managed well for millions of years. But now humans are around.
 
rjh01 said:
Only hope these trees do not meet the same fate as a lot of rainforest. That is cut down for wood, mining, and farmland. Might be ok in Australia or USA, but in poor countries anything can happen.

I only hope none of these trees need watering after planting.

Then trees are only part of the environment. What about the animals? Yes, forests of all types have managed well for millions of years. But now humans are around.
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The Arbor Day Foundation has been doing this for 47 years, I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing when it comes to this.
 
PhantomWolf said:
The Arbor Day Foundation are specialists in Restorative Forest planting, meaning that they go into an area where a lot of native forest has been cut down and along with the local Government and forestry partners, they replant the area with trees that are native to that area, both in and around the existing forests. Because they aren't just planting pine plantations everywhere, once planted the trees will mostly look after themselves just as those that weren't planted by the Foundation do.
Click to expand...

Similar to how the U.S. government replants national forests after fires or logging operations. The trees and planted and get little to no care after. Because they are using the appropriate species the survival rate is still pretty good. And it goes fast, they carry a bag of seedlings and a shovel. Takes a few seconds to push the shovel into the ground, pivot it to push a bit of soil out of the way, grab a seedling from the bag and put it in, remove the shovel, push the little hole close with a foot, and move again. I've seen people able to plant trees at a slow walking pace, barely stopping with each seedling. Reforestation looks very different than planing trees in the park, it goes much faster and expects a lower survival rate, but achieves success by accounting for the lower survival rate during the planning phase.

I know in some cases reforestation is tied to government regulation. India and Nepal have made big pushes to get people to switch from using wood fires for cooking to using propane or kerosene instead. They tied that to increased regulations on the harvesting of trees for such purposes and to health initiatives pointing out the impacts from breathing in wood smoke every time a meal is prepared. Nepal has certainly had success with reforestation, I think at least some parts of India have as well.

This is not the perfect solution. Nothing ever is. It is still a very good step in the right direction.
 
PhantomWolf said:
Yeah, they are doing that

However, trees also expire a lot of water from their leaves, about 95% of what they draw from the soils, and so when you get a lot of trees together they can actually create their own climate and rain. China is using this to start slowing the encroachment and reclaiming the southern parts of the Gobi Desert. Israel has also used it to convert desert in to arable lands.

ETA: It's also a reason the felling rain forests are so bad, by cutting down the trees, it destroys these climates and ends up reducing the rains, thus drying the rest out and killing more forest, which dries it out even more.
Click to expand...

Um, cite the science behind changing the local climate?

I can sure see re-panting where forests are known to have grown naturally,m because the climate there IS good for the trees. But if trees like it everywhere, we wouldn't have the Great Plains in America, or the Kalahari, or Gobi, that are all rimmed with trees.

Re-planting the native trees,as Arbor fund is, as mentioned in this thread, will work. Changing the local climate? No any more than dumping that irrigation water on the ground. So why does California still have the Imperial Desert, rather than the Imperial Forest?
 
crescent said:
Before anyone throws shade on this, 20,000,000 trees planted is an achievable goal. It's a big, difficult goal, but not insane.

For comparison, the U.S. Forest Service has a nursery in Nebraska that produces about 2.5 million seedlings a year, mostly for reforestation after logging operations or forest fires.

Lots of developing nations are pushing re-forestation. Lots of good work can be done here. They might be able to get this done by just adding funding to a lot of existing reforestation efforts, no need to reinvent the wheel.
Click to expand...

Nurseries are nice, but there is another method that will get the trees planted more economically and efficiently. That is using drones to plant or drop seed bombs in a digitally mapped area. The seed containers can be as simple as a handful of native tree seeds inside a hardened ball of manure, and as complex as a seed pod made of biodegradable material.

While drones don't plant as carefully as a human can, they can plant a lot more trees in a set period of time than any human, and they can go places humans cannot. The drones are mimicking the pooping creatures who normally do the reforesting work in nature.:cool:

Seed dropping drones
 
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Nosi said:
Nurseries are nice, but there is another method that will get the trees planted more economically and efficiently. That is using drones to plant or drop seed bombs in a digitally mapped area. The seed containers can be as simple as a handful of native tree seeds inside a hardened ball of manure, and as complex as a seed pod made of biodegradable material.

While drones don't plant as carefully as a human can, they can plant a lot more trees in a set period of time than any human, and they can go places humans cannot. The drones are mimicking the pooping creatures who normally do the reforesting work in nature.:cool:

Seed dropping drones
Click to expand...

Another advantage of this is that the cost of the seeds is very small, so you can have a large failure rate and that is ok.

I suggest that instead of using drone helicopters, as per the link, they use drone fixed wing aircraft. These would have far better performance.
 
Nosi said:
Nurseries are nice, but there is another method that will get the trees planted more economically and efficiently. That is using drones to plant or drop seed bombs in a digitally mapped area. The seed containers can be as simple as a handful of native tree seeds inside a hardened ball of manure, and as complex as a seed pod made of biodegradable material.

While drones don't plant as carefully as a human can, they can plant a lot more trees in a set period of time than any human, and they can go places humans cannot. The drones are mimicking the pooping creatures who normally do the reforesting work in nature.:cool:

Seed dropping drones
Click to expand...

No.

We tried something similar when I worked for the Bureau of Land Management, trying to reseed burned areas.

We had previously tried just spreading seed by aircraft, but got very poor results, the suggestion was that rodents were eating the seeds before we got enough rain for the seeds to germinate. We tried seeds coated with bitterant, but the results were not much better, the bitterant just was not enough of a deterrent.

So we tried seed balls, seeds encased in a mix of soil and organic matter. We used a mix of potting soil, clay, and coconut fibers to make a sort of adobe. The idea was to put those out in the desert and wait for rain to come. The balls would protect the seeds from grainivores, but once it did eventually rain, the rain would dissolve the seed ball and the seeds would germinate. In theory.

It didn't work well at all. The problem was the consistency of the balls. If we made them firm enough to stand up to handling, they would not dissolve to release the seeds when the ball was moistened. If we made them too soft, they could not tolerate much of any handling. We had to make the balls pretty fast, because if the seeds stayed moist too long when the ball was formed, they would germinate before they could get distributed.

We tried using some agricultural equipment from a commercial greenhouse. Similar problems, if we made the mix soft enough to go through the extruders, then it would be too dry and the balls would be too crumbly. Make it wetter and it would not go through the machine and we would be at risk of germinating the seeds.

The balls had to be pretty large to prevent rodents from eating the seeds. We ended up making them flat to maximize contact with the soil, we stopped calling them seed balls and called them seed patties.

I did the math to look at how many plants per hectare we wanted, and calculated how many seed balls we would need. I weighed a few of the crumbly seed patties we had made by hand (crumbly because we could not wet the mix too much when making them and because we needed to keep the clay content low enough to allow the moisture to penetrate the patty after it had been placed in the restoration area). I came up with a figure of about 15 tons of seed patties per hectare. We had a 15,000 acre (6000 hectare) burn scar.

We did some anyway, but it was never very practical, we just did it as more of an educational thing for energized volunteers. It was fun and messy, but didn't really help the situation much.

The drone program you linked to is using somewhat different and updated methods - but I an still pretty skeptical. That's a lot of heavy seed pellets, a lot of energy for a big and strong enough air gun, one shot at a time. I don't think they are going to beat the cost of hand laborers in India or Africa or South America. Time will tell I guess, but based on my own experiences in revegetation, I am pretty skeptical.
 
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casebro said:
Um, cite the science behind changing the local climate?
Click to expand...

https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0906.htm

"Tropical rainforests play a vital role in the functioning of the planet's natural systems. The forests regulate local and global weather through their absorption and creation of rainfall and their exchange of atmospheric gases. For example, the Amazon alone creates 50-80 percent of its own rainfall through transpiration. Cutting the rainforests changes the reflectivity of the earth's surface, which affects global weather by altering wind and ocean current patterns, and changes rainfall distribution. If the forests continue to be destroyed, global weather patterns may become more unstable and extreme."

The science of forests affect local climate is well established and well understood.
 
smartcooky said:
https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0906.htm

"Tropical rainforests play a vital role in the functioning of the planet's natural systems. The forests regulate local and global weather through their absorption and creation of rainfall and their exchange of atmospheric gases. For example, the Amazon alone creates 50-80 percent of its own rainfall through transpiration. Cutting the rainforests changes the reflectivity of the earth's surface, which affects global weather by altering wind and ocean current patterns, and changes rainfall distribution. If the forests continue to be destroyed, global weather patterns may become more unstable and extreme."

The science of forests affect local climate is well established and well understood.
Click to expand...

That MAY answer the re-seeding side. I want to see a desert turned in to a forest, any where?
 
PhantomWolf said:
Yeah, they are doing that

...... Israel has also used it to convert desert in to arable lands.

ETA: It's also a reason the felling rain forests are so bad, by cutting down the trees, it destroys these climates and ends up reducing the rains, thus drying the rest out and killing more forest, which dries it out even more.
Click to expand...

Cite of the Israeli thing? They actually turned desert into a place that does not need external water?
 
casebro said:
That MAY answer the re-seeding side. I want to see a desert turned in to a forest, any where?
Click to expand...

That's the thing though. Many of the deserts we have right now have not always been deserts. Poor agricultural and land use practices have resulted in quite a bit of desertification. Reforestation of deserts has potential to be very effective if those deserts are essentially human created.

Not all deserts are like that of course. Much of the Sahara is going to be a desert no matter what anyone does. Same for the Mojave, the Gobi, and many others. But those deserts (the Sahara especially) have shown significant expansion in the past few hundred years dues to human activity. We can't turn the Sahara into a forest, but be can make it a smaller desert than it is now.
 
casebro said:
Re-planting the native trees,as Arbor fund is, as mentioned in this thread, will work. Changing the local climate? No any more than dumping that irrigation water on the ground. So why does California still have the Imperial Desert, rather than the Imperial Forest?
Click to expand...


First goalpost move
casebro said:
That MAY answer the re-seeding side. I want to see a desert turned in to a forest, any where?
Click to expand...


Second goalpost move
casebro said:
Cite of the Israeli thing? They actually turned desert into a place that does not need external water?
Click to expand...


I look forward to seeing what you can come up with for your third goalpost move.
 
crescent said:
No.

We tried something similar when I worked for the Bureau of Land Management, trying to reseed burned areas.

We had previously tried just spreading seed by aircraft, but got very poor results, the suggestion was that rodents were eating the seeds before we got enough rain for the seeds to germinate. We tried seeds coated with bitterant, but the results were not much better, the bitterant just was not enough of a deterrent.

So we tried seed balls, seeds encased in a mix of soil and organic matter. We used a mix of potting soil, clay, and coconut fibers to make a sort of adobe. The idea was to put those out in the desert and wait for rain to come. The balls would protect the seeds from grainivores, but once it did eventually rain, the rain would dissolve the seed ball and the seeds would germinate. In theory.

It didn't work well at all. The problem was the consistency of the balls. If we made them firm enough to stand up to handling, they would not dissolve to release the seeds when the ball was moistened. If we made them too soft, they could not tolerate much of any handling. We had to make the balls pretty fast, because if the seeds stayed moist too long when the ball was formed, they would germinate before they could get distributed.

We tried using some agricultural equipment from a commercial greenhouse. Similar problems, if we made the mix soft enough to go through the extruders, then it would be too dry and the balls would be too crumbly. Make it wetter and it would not go through the machine and we would be at risk of germinating the seeds.

The balls had to be pretty large to prevent rodents from eating the seeds. We ended up making them flat to maximize contact with the soil, we stopped calling them seed balls and called them seed patties.

I did the math to look at how many plants per hectare we wanted, and calculated how many seed balls we would need. I weighed a few of the crumbly seed patties we had made by hand (crumbly because we could not wet the mix too much when making them and because we needed to keep the clay content low enough to allow the moisture to penetrate the patty after it had been placed in the restoration area). I came up with a figure of about 15 tons of seed patties per hectare. We had a 15,000 acre (6000 hectare) burn scar.

We did some anyway, but it was never very practical, we just did it as more of an educational thing for energized volunteers. It was fun and messy, but didn't really help the situation much.

The drone program you linked to is using somewhat different and updated methods - but I an still pretty skeptical. That's a lot of heavy seed pellets, a lot of energy for a big and strong enough air gun, one shot at a time. I don't think they are going to beat the cost of hand laborers in India or Africa or South America. Time will tell I guess, but based on my own experiences in revegetation, I am pretty skeptical.
Click to expand...

They are now coating the outside of these seed balls with ghost pepper essence to keep the critters off. Once you ditch the eaters, the next issue is getting the seeds to germinate, and some seed drone companies use drones to water the seed balls, that gets a head start to the little trees.
 
crescent said:
We can't turn the Sahara into a forest, but be can make it a smaller desert than it is now.
Click to expand...

Depends on who you mean by "we." Reforestation, and in particular desert reclamation isn't a short term project. It's not something we will so finished in our lifetimes, and probably not even our great, great grandkids lifetimes, but over 1,000 years, 1,500 years, it is certainly doable if we can stay dedicated to it. And that's the hard part.
 
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