Up until two days ago, I’d never even heard of the Araucaria forest–and maybe that’s not so surprising. There really isn’t much of it left.
In the past, it sprawled across Southern Brazil and parts of Argentina, covering an area more than twice the size of England. Today, there’s less than 1% of it left. The tall and magical araucaria trees that once towered overhead like strange umbrellas have been logged, and the forests stripped bare to make way for agriculture.
Part of Brazil’s strange Atlantic Forest, the Araucaria forest suffers from its little-known status. Just as clouded leopard conservation on Borneo receives only a fraction of the funding of its more famous tiger and snow leopard cousins, conservation of Brazil’s Araucaria forests has been somewhat sidelined by concerns for the country’s vast and world-renown Amazonian jungles. It’s slipped under the radar of most people, including conservationists.
But this is changing. There are folks at Sociedade Chauá, a Brazillian NGO, who are fighting for the return of a lost forest.
Once this ancient forest was home to healthy populations of hundreds of species of animal and plants. Now, Sociedade Chauá are trying to restore the relic rainforest fragments– and they’re doing it in a very special way.
Usually tree-planting for restoration purposes follows an all-too-predictable path. Because it’s difficult to raise and nurture lots of different seedlings in nurseries, often people planting trees in degraded areas only end up using a small number of species.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, this can just involve the planting of low-diversity acacia or eucalyptus plantations–hardly worthy of the the term restoration at all! But even in the few attempts to restore heavily logged rainforests to their former glory that I’ve witnessed, it’s rare to see more than a few common native species planted.
Sociedade Chauá, though, have gone out of their way to try an bring a bit of diversity back into the mix. They actively plant rare species, those that would usually never see the light of day in a restoration project.
To do so hasn’t been easy. They’ve had to learn how to tend to species that have never been cultivated in a nursery before, and figure out ways to make the seedlings grow and thrive long enough that they can eventually be planted to reform a complex forest ecosystem.
But most impressively of all, they’ve had to source hundreds of kilograms of rare seeds for their nurseries in the first place–a mammoth task that has involved countless hours spent traipsing through remaining fragments mapping networks of mother trees.
In many ways, Sociedade Chauá are pioneers of forest restoration. And their ways are spreading. A growing network of farmers, NGOs and other nurseries are involving threatened species in the restoration work, supported by the immense expertise and seed-sourcing abilities that Sociedade Chauá has amassed.
If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. For me, what Sociedade Chauá are doing is some proper restoration work–and I hope it keeps spreading.
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