A major project is underway in the backcountry of Gros Morne National Park, where close to 300,000 seedlings are being planted on grassy ridges to restore the natural forests after years of moose feeding.
A quick helicopter ride from Rocky Harbour to the rolling hills behind Sally’s Cove shows large sections of moose meadows, where in the 1980s and 1990s the large moose populations ate the trees and shrubs, killing them. The conifer trees — like black spruce, balsam fire and white spruce — never grew back.
Now, large palettes of seedlings have been flown into the remote area where dozens of tree planters spent the last weeks of summer planting 2,000 a day.
“[It’s] really, really hard work,” said Mike Downden during one of his water breaks.
He is one of the only planters from Newfoundland and Labrador, and this is his third summer planting for Parks Canada.
“You got to really try to keep motivated. [It’s a] good thing we got a great team to keep us going and help each other out, which is really nice,” Downden said.
Downden said he can really see the progress the team has made during the early morning ride in the helicopter.
“Hopefully we will get to see the forest come back in 50, 60 years,” he said.
Darroch Whitaker is an ecological scientist with Gros Morne National park who’s leading the long-term forest health program.
He said the 2011 moose harvesting program has since controlled the overeating, but for the past 40 years the brush and shrubs grew in thick, stopping any large conifers from growing back.
“When we have sites like this that are ecologically degraded, they have been shifted to an alternative state by a stress in the ecosystem. In this case, moose,” said Whitaker.
See Gros Morne’s backcountry from a chopper — and Parks Canada’s skyhigh goal of planting one million trees
He said the restoration process is helping to combat climate change in a nature-based way.
“You can picture the trees we plant today are going to last a hundred years or more, hopefully. And the trees will pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere,” said Whitaker.
He said the black peat soil that will eventually develop around the trees will help regulate the climate by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The tree planting program started six years ago but this is the third summer planters have been out for two-week periods planting thousands of seedlings.
The budget is close to $4.5 million, with an end goal of planting one million trees. That will take several more summers to complete.
“I think we will have hopefully restored most of the most severely affected areas in the park,” said Whitaker.
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