March 12, 2024 New Orleans, LA
The Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative (LICI) and Common Ground Relief have announced the completion of their winter 2023 - 2024 joint tree planting project at the US Fish & Wildlife Service's Bayou Sauvage National Urban Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans, La. The two groups gathered enough volunteers to plant over 3,000 tree seedlings this winter.
A volunteer group is shown during one of LICI's fall 2023 Monday work-morning events. LICI has held these work mornings each spring and fall since 2021 to kill the Chinese tallow invasive tree species to open areas up for new native trees to be planted. They also cleared brush and young tallow trees that covered existing native trees, which had been planted in previous years by other volunteer groups.
LICI is the originator and permit holder for the Chinese tallow tree eradication project and the tree planting project in the refuge, which has been ongoing for three years.
Gary Salathe, LICI's president, helped organize many of this season's tree-planting events, supervised the volunteers on some days, and helped supervise other days.
LICI's volunteers worked in the weeks before this year's tree plantings to kill bushes and Chinese tallow trees in some areas where the trees were to be planted. LICI's volunteers also set up small flags where each tree was to be planted in the days before each tree planting event in the refuge's ridge forest. Their volunteers also helped with planting the trees.
Common Ground Relief's co-directors, Josh Benitez and Christina Lehew, applied for the grants, ordered the trees, delivered the trees and the equipment needed, supplied volunteer groups, helped organize some of the events, and helped to supervise the volunteers on many of the planting days.
Common Ground Relief's co-directors, Josh Benitez and Christina Lehew, are shown on the non-profit's boat as they ferry volunteers for a tree planting event in the Bayou Sauvage Refuge in February 2024.
The Ella West Foundation and New Orleans Town & Gardeners issued the grants that funded the project, as they have for two previous years. "We greatly appreciated their confidence and support in our tree planting project at the refuge," Salathe said. "Their funds allowed our partnership to accomplish the goal of planting 3,000 seedlings this winter at the refuge," Salathe added.
The tree planting events for the 2023-2024 winter planting season at the refuge:
January 9 to January 11, 2024
Sixteen student volunteers and their leaders from Drew University in New Jersey planted 1,000 bare-root hardwood seedlings. Common Ground Relief hosted the group during their one-week trip to New Orleans to volunteer for habitat restoration projects. They were staying at Common Ground's Ninth Ward headquarters buildings.
The Drew University volunteers are seen with bags full of tree seedlings as they prepare to go out to the planting site.
The group planted white oak, live oak, and American elm tree seedlings. Benitez said these are some of the tree species listed in a study done by the University of New Orleans of the native trees that were found in the refuge's ridge forest. The study was done just prior to Hurricane Katrina. "One of our goals is to try and get some of the tree species that did not survive the hurricane back into the ridge forest. However, the main goal is to replace every Chinese tallow tree in the boardwalk's ridge forest with a native tree," he said.
The seedlings were planted in the boardwalk area of the refuge's ridge forest. The group replaced about 25% of the trees planted last year that did not survive the extreme drought the area experienced this past summer and fall.
The Drew University volunteers and the project supervisors are seen after the last tree seedling was planted on January 11th.
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Volunteers from Common Ground Relief and LICI planted hundreds of bald cypress trees in a remote area of the refuge that was only accessible by boat. The refuge manager, Pon Dixson, ferried the volunteers, trees, and equipment to the site and back.
The Chinese tallow trees had not been killed off at this new site, so plans will be made to come back in the fall to do this.
Some volunteers from February 15th are shown in the photo on the left during the boat ride to the site. All of the volunteers are shown in the group photo taken at the end of the day.
Friday, February 16, 2024
Nine volunteers from Limitless Vistas, Louisiana Master Naturalists of Greater New Orleans, Common Ground Relief, and LICI planted over 250 tree seedlings on a gloomy, drizzly day. The group planted cypress and hackberry trees in the refuge's boardwalk ridge forest.
LICI's Gary Salathe (center) is seen with two of the workers from Limitless Vistas during the February 16th tree planting event.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Volunteers from Common Ground Relief, Limitless Vistas, Louisiana Master Naturalists of Greater New Orleans, and LICI returned to the refuge's ridge forest and planted another 350 bald cypress and hackberry trees.
After planting the last trees, the February 19th volunteers took this group photo.
February 27 - 29, 2024
Local volunteers from Common Ground Relief and LICI worked for three days to finish planting cypress trees in the remote area of the refuge that was only accessible by boat. (Photos above)
Monday, March 4, 2024
Volunteers from Limitless Vistas, Louisiana Master Naturalists of Greater New Orleans, and LICI returned to the refuge's ridge forest. They planted the last of the 3,000 trees, finishing up the project for the year.
Limitless Vistas' workers are seen getting ready to plant the last cypress and hackberry trees in the refuge's ridge forest on March 4th.
This is the third and last year of LICI's and Common Ground Relief's partnership to restore the Bayou Sauvage Refuge Ridge forest in the boardwalk area. Salathe said, "This is a great example of how numerous individual volunteers with diverse backgrounds and volunteers from various organizations can come together to do great things. Our project with Common Ground Relief accomplished our goal of restoring this critical area of the ridge forest only because of the help we received from everyone involved. 'Thank you!' goes out to them."
LICI's original goal was to only restore the ridge forest in the boardwalk area of the refuge. Even though that goal has been accomplished, 60% of the ridge forest outside the boardwalk area still needs restoration.
Common Ground plans to continue the work of restoring the entire ridge forest over the next few years. They will apply for a permit to continue the work during the 2024- 2025 winter planting season.
LICI will be asking the refuge staff to renew the group's permit for 2024-2025 to remove brush and young tallow trees that may grow over the tree seedlings planted this season.
Salathe says he is often asked why his iris group is killing tallow trees and planting native trees. He said he always refers people to this blog posting to get the answer: https://theamericanirissociety.blogspot.com/2022/03/mission-creep-and-conservation-of.html.of
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