How we are creating a forest in this barren patch of Iceland

foreign [Music] is such a dramatic such a rough landscape and that of course is one of the reasons why I love it and why so many people here decide to visit I mean it looks like it belongs in another planet but it has a sad truth which is that it's actually a depleted landscape I mean it's lost most of its soil with places like this one being really common throughout the landscape and when it comes to its trees and its forests it's a disaster it's it lost pretty much all of it as you can see again the landscape behind me is the perfect example not a single proper tree inside which is why we've decided to plant one million trees here in Iceland in the next couple of years at sites just like this one right here and in a few other places around the island and in this video today I want to tell you more about our planting area here and how we are going to go about planting all of these trees to give you the context that you need I think we should start with a recap of why Iceland looks like this instead of this you see many millions of years ago this Island used to have all sorts of species in its forests such as redwoods and Magnolias I mean can you imagine the sites it would have been incredible to see and then through successive glaciations the temperatures dropped and the forest composition changed until eventually the whole island was covered in ice and this kicked off a magical dance between the trees and the ice down the ages sometimes the glaciers would cover the whole island and then on other occasions they would retract just enough to allow foursome forests to flush and then around 11 000 years ago at the end of the younger driest period we had the final swing in this dance and the glaciers retreated again to leave enough space for forests to flourish the trees that returned were mainly Birch but also tea leafed Willow Rowan and Aspen of which there are eight known individuals which clones into all the Aspen on the island by this point these pretty basic Birch Woods covered around 25 to 40 percent of the islands and could grow up to 15 meters in height now this isn't some mighty primordial Forest but it was how far natural regeneration managed to get in about 10 000 years or so and surely it played a key role in this Island's ecosystem but of course after human settlement around 1150 years ago it couldn't last and the forest quickly disappeared to make way for sheep grades it is estimated that about 95 of the forests were lost and by the middle of the last century Birchwood covered only 0.5 to 1 percent of Iceland this comes with all sorts of problems such as increased rates of erosion and desertification which can impact livelihoods but also wild ecosystems so efforts began to start planting these forests and right now we have around two percent of Iceland covered in trees which is already a nice Improvement and last year for our part we kicked off this project with a small small effort to plant 60 000 trees this was really useful to learn the robes and to understand this island better but now we are Keen to expand this project properly the property we are planning on is public land and it is managed by the Icelandic forestry service a government agency that we worked with and they were the ones that planted these non-native forests you can see here so these forests here they've been some of the earliest experiments done by the Icelandic forestry service to plant trees in Iceland and it's probably one of the rare exceptions where you know I feel okay about planting non-native species it's not what we are going to do with our area up there but I still think it's it's really interesting what they've done here and it all comes from a context of there being no trees here and the Icelandic forestry service back in the day just wanting to get something started and picking the species that grew best and the truth is we have a bit of a forest here and uh yeah it's where we've been finding all the birds hiding uh lights this winter our planting site is located here just above these forests and in April I was able to meet with Thruster thrusty and Rain from the ifs to discuss the ins and outs of our new planting area and bit by bit a picture started to form so let me situate you properly we are on the Northwestern side of a wide Valley with a glacier River in the middle and the hekla volcano on the Southeastern side the volcano makes for a stunning backdrop of course but it also represents an interesting piece of History you see this Valley was settled early on as it was ideal land for farming but after about 200 years of settlement in the year 1104 hekla erupted and the strong Eastern winds covered this Valley in a thick layer of volcanic tephra which is anything from huge rocks to fine Ash and because the forests were already gone the tephra couldn't settle properly the flat area there where the tephra kept blowing around back and forth it never recovered so you can see the remnants of the thousand-year-old farmsteads there now which are kind of square places with with rock where rocks have been piled to make the the base and then turf was put on top of that but the turf is all gone we had two forms remaining here unless it's less than two yeah much more recently there were there were there was a new settlement so somewhere in the in the 1700s or something like that people started coming back but not in the flat area just in the just down the edges here by the hillsides where their vegetation had recovered now before we look at the planting area itself and how we are going to overcome certain difficulties I want to first talk about the finest in 2023 for this project we are budgeting throttle milliona Islands yeah I'm sorry I I really just wanted to try it out now this is a chunky budget but it accounts for the bulk of our tree planting for this year the funding for this comes of course from our members we're planning to use about 28 to 32 percent of our impact budget until the end of 2024 in Icelandic tree planting because we really believe in reforesting this island so in total for this season we are aiming to plant around 200 000 trees here in this area and then follow it up next year with another location education and at least half a million trees and if you would like to help us achieve this goal then please consider becoming a Mossy Earth member we do all kinds of really impactful rewilding projects such as bringing back help forests to create habitat in the sea running a pilot project to help termites fight desertification and even flooding forests to create rare Wetlands we report all of this in your account along with regular updates on the projects through posts and these videos of course and recently we've also launched this really cool transparency database which tracks our impact across different categories and also shows you all the actions and all the transactions we Implement with your money we are not funded by some fancy investors or a large company we're just a group of people that is trying to build a community that can help restore and protect wild ecosystems so if you'd like to join that then please check out mossy.earth to learn all about what we do and if that feels like a big commitment for now then please consider watching our other video videos subscribing to the channel and following along and of course leaving a comment this helps massively with the algorithm so now let's get back to the project area for this specific site we are going to plant up here in the sheltered nooks and crannies just before the top of this hill now you might wonder Iceland is huge and it has plenty of flat bits so why go here well the thing is that above all you need areas which are fenced because the Sheep roamed the highlands in the summer and they would literally devour our trees if they were allowed to do so and given the ifs has this area fenced and good to go we feel we should simply start with that the area can be broadly divided into four different types Baron patches with frost heaving most dominated Fields small patches of dwarf Birch and areas covered in Lupine each one of these is important for our work so let's take a look at each one now so this here is our namesake the Moss to be more specific the rachometrium mosque and it's what covers most of our planting area and it's a really important species Iceland is covered in Moss and there are around 460 species here which occupy an interesting place in the natural succession because they're both an excellent Pioneer that settles into very arid areas and starts producing soil and at the same time a terrible obstacle for the next stages of succession it essentially blocks the trees from growing here until some major disturbance comes along such as a volcanic eruption and human disturbance can of course speed things up what's happening here is that they that the woolly Willow that you see here it's becoming established by the roadside where there's been disturbance in the Moss but there's much less of it or probably almost none out in the Moss Field so we can effectively disturb the Moss and plant the trees on it thus accelerating this whole process and if you're worried about what happens to the Moss when the trees come in well it seems to return rather well on the forest floor as demonstrated by the forest down in the valley and some of the Native forests which I've visited and these are the only trees which grow here the Birch which is of course Iceland's only real native tree but as you can see they're growing a bit you know like bonsais and there's a couple of reasons for that the first one is the conditions right they're the first trees moving into this part of the landscape but the second reason is that they've mixed a lot with the other Birch species here in Iceland namely Betula NaNa which is the dwarf Birch and the birds that we want to plant are a little bit more pure and hopefully will grow slightly straighter than this so that they can be more than bonsais in a few days in addition to Birch we've also decided to plant gray Alder and black Alder these species live alongside the Birch in comparable climates in southern Norway and they're also found in the Poland records so in our eyes they make a great candidate to diversify our woodlands in the long run we might not plant any this summer just yet but a batch is on the way and this here is also something that we are trying to avoid it's Frost breathing and what would happen if we planted a tree here essentially it's really easy to plant right like you just dig a hole in something like this stick a tree in process is relatively simple but essentially the next year because the frost would push this Earth up and then down again our tree would simply pop out and it would be just lying here and that's not what we're trying to achieve here so we'll try to avoid these more open areas okay so for you to really see this I mean the ground here looks like perfectly normal gravel then you start tapping it and it behaves more like jello more like water you can see it just jiggles bounces it's really really strange and most definitely not what you would like for a tree to be planted in so when we plant in areas like these we try to go into where you have some vegetation cover and that actually also lifts up but it you know settles down as a one unit so the rotor will still be here and unfortunately new Planters want to plant where it's easiest which is here not a little bit more difficult which is to think and plant it here okay so it's going to be a lot of instructions for the Planters today they always new Planters always need these instructions and last year some of our trees were unfortunately planted in this way it was a small portion and they were replanted but that is why we do pilot projects and then recalibrate for the second year and of course this shot we took of me planting last year is the perfect example on how not to plant trees yeah well it's just a million people that have seen this well this year our plan is to scout the location properly and then add this information to a detailed map on an app for the Planters to follow and then they will go out each day and use this app while planting so that the progress can be matched with the strategy that was made and we end up with more trees in the right place and if you have some thoughts on our approach to increase the Precision of our planting then please let us know in the comments down below we're always looking for advice and additional bits of knowledge so in these areas that are full of this Frost breathing we're going to look to plants in bits like that and like that but there'll be very few trees going in these areas here but as you can see once you start adding up all these little Islands it becomes something so that's how we're going to get a little bit more into these areas but there's more to that actually we have a plant that really can help us here and I'm of course talking about the controversial Lupine we made a whole video about this last summer and we might follow it up this this year with a part two but what you need to know is that they are invasive and they settle in arid soils and by nitrogen in the soil this means some people hate Lupine and some people love it and our planting area has some sizable patches of Lupine well right now it doesn't look that glorious blue purple that we can see in in summer it it looks more like this you know this this brown mess right here but you can still see the work that it's doing by essentially colonizing these areas that are really hard for other plants to to colonize and here we actually have a super interesting example of exactly why Lupine can play a pretty important role in the Regeneration of these Landscapes so here in the middle of this field of lupine we have a birch and another Birch and another Birch right there another one down there and they're all over the place and they're following the Lupine up as it colonizes new areas as you can see for the purposes of our work I think the Lupine is doing a great job as it seems to disappear when the forests form but this whole debate can probably wait for another video these areas are great for trees and we will cut the loop in and plant trees in some of these patches to take advantage of the soil that they are creating I'm really excited about how this project is progressing and how it's taking shape I think we're gonna have a big impact on on this landscape here and as usual if you would like to support these kinds of rewilding projects then be sure to head over to mossy.earth to learn more about our membership ultimately it is what makes all of this work possible and it's just so exciting that people can can get together and do something amazing like this so to everyone who's already a member thank you so much for your contributions and for allowing us to do this amazing work and to restore these Landscapes until next time cheers

Channel: Mossy Earth

Views: 353,300

Keywords: Iceland, Restoration, Invasive Species, Lupin restoring Soil, Lupine Desert, Lupine Iceland, Lupine Europe, Reforestation, iceland, rewilding iceland, iceland reforestation, reforesting iceland, tree planting iceland, iceland forests, iceland volcano, tree planting Iceland, reforestation efforts in iceland, iceland wildlife photography, iceland rewilding, viking forests, birch forest, birch reforestation, Iceland nature restoration, replanting iceland, Iceland Rewilding

Id: eywX-oj2Bck

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023