A campaign to plant 50 million trees across Ontario by 2025 is getting closer to its goal.
Forests Ontario and its partners planted 2.5 million trees this year to exceed the 40 million mark since the effort started in 2007.
The program solicits space from private landowners and municipalities large enough to plant at least 500 trees.
Chief Executive Officer Jess Kaknevicius says this year’s number is outside that planted by the forest industry.
“In northwestern Ontario, we’ve been working over the past few years to plant over 568,000 trees within the region. That’s really been the success of our partners, but also working with landowners,” says Kaknevicius.
This year has been an active forest fire season, with thousands of hectares destroyed.
Kaknevicius says those fires have actually been a benefit to raising awareness of the importance of our forests.
“We’ve had a really high fire season as a result of many things like climate change, like impacts to the landscape, like invasive species, and the lack of forest management. So, when we think about what this means for our planting into the future, we really want to focus on restoring forests on those landscapes after fire, but also thinking about how we are managing those forests into the future.”
With the campaign heading in the final 10 million, a push is on to attract more land owners to the program.
“We’re looking for landowners who are looking to restore some of their land into forest cover. It might be an area of your property that has been not used, or maybe that was used for agriculture and isn’t really viable anymore, or just an area that needs to be restored.”
Kaknevicius says they work with contractors who will do an assessment of the land and help property owners determine what trees are best suited, develop a site plan and get the trees in the ground.
Regular checks on the health of the trees are done over the next few years.
Anyone interested in learning more about the program, or wanting to participate, can contact Forest Ontario through its website.
