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we've been working to save and restore a very special Place full of wonderful species that exist nowhere else on Earth and to do so we've been resorting to some exciting technology as well as some pretty extreme interventions the essence of this project is quite simple we have these two super rare narrow endemic plant species that grow only here only on these Cliffs nowhere else on Earth we have this Vine here that Twirls nicely over the native plants and also climbs the rocks of the sheer Cliff faces and this which is a sub succulent shrub that can pretty much grow out of bare rock it's really impressive so both of these plants are amazing and wonderful in their own right but they have a problem
they're being overrun by one of the worst invasive plant species at a global level which is the ice plant so our project naturally is to try to rip out this ice plant and lucky for us it's quite easy to rip it out actually it's pretty simple you just pull and it comes out but the problem is that we are working here this is a pretty tricky environment to operating we've had to learn to use drones and AI to identify the areas with invasives so that we then can access them from the top of the cliff using ropes to rip them out and take them out for good so in this video today I want to catch you up on 2 years worth of progress on this project and of course tell you all about this wonderful and often ignored Cliff ecosystem these
impressive Cliffs are located here just south of Lisbon they're formed out of limestone and in a coastline that faces West they're quite unique facing the South which traps the Heat and creates a special microclimate it's always wonderfully warm down here even on a foggy day like today and it's actually November 19th today and I'm wearing t-shirt and shorts and at the top of the cliff I had to wear a jacket so this microclimate really checks out but in addition to that there's also the steepness of these Cliffs which is essentially means that humans probably never fully transformed this area which in our day and age is quite a rare thing as you can see in this shot here the
agricultural fields on the top never really extended all the way to the cliff areas and part of this is because they are steep but above all this steepness leads to a terrible lack of soil and this sad dry looking soil might sound like a bad thing but as with most things it really depends on your perspective so if you're an oak sure this is a terrible place to try and grow but for some other plants it represented an opportunity to find some space to flourish so they have adapted and that is how we ended up with all of these narrow endemic species and just to prove that point we can look at this flat area here right next to the Steep Cliffs here the soil doesn't wash away as much and
there is natural succession happening which means that it is dominated by bushes like the Shish and trees like the cypresses and the carames oak the point is that these plants live in a super Niche environment and there are two species that are particularly rare and exist only in the clips that you can see in this shot so this is eforia Pedro and it is a sub succulent shrub which means that it can store a lot of water and that is of course how it survives in this dry environment it takes this to the extreme in the summer when it gets rid of most of its leaves to help conserve water and we found them growing in all sorts of different and extreme places I really love how much these
plants look like a small Bonsai but when you touch them they're actually quite bendy and not Woody and the way they were produced is by explosive seed dispersal which then gets picked up by ants and moved around and this here is convol fernandi and it is a species of Vine that grows by Twining over other plants as well as climbing over rocks we found the climbing over all kinds of different plant species as well as bare rock and in the spring it has these beautiful white flowers which gives them an ethereal look this Vine has some distant cousins in other Islands in macaronesia which is comprised of these archipelagos however these days there is no suitable habitat for them within
their dispersal range so they're effectively stuck here which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't being overrun by Ice blend and to properly introduce you to them I asked mattz the other co-founder of Mossy Earth to show you how it covers the cliffs down south where he lives I actually have a bit of a LoveHate relationship with the ice plant now on the one hand I know it can be bad for biodiversity but on the other hand I'm kind of used to it being here at the beach um and I think it looks kind of cool where it Cascades down these rocks behind me um and also this time of year the yellow fruit gives off this really sweet strawberry Aroma and the fruits are edible simply tear off the head squeeze the base of the
fruit and then suck down all that brown gooy liquid nice but despite its seemingly okay taste this succulent from South Africa is one of the worst invasives there is it is well documented to cause complete changes in the coastal plant structure and it does so by changing the soil moisture content the salinity and the pH to suit itself but making it unbearable for other plants and before you think that we are just ice blun haters I want to show you how much it has spread globally and where it is at the moment and then here you can see the range of the convolves and theoria I think the picture says it all so at some point in 2020 tagu one of our biologists learned about the special narrow endemic plants and he went
looking for them and what he found was this they were completely overrun by ice plant so we were looking for project ideas and I learned about these endemic plants that exist only on these Cliffs which is a place that I spend a lot of time in I come climbing here and so I started coming on Hikes trying to find these endemic plants and on one of those hikes we came to this spot where we are now and um we found the euphorbia and we found it being surrounded by the invasive ice plant and that was immediately a bit of a light bulb moment because it was here's something we can do to help these plants and then seeing them also on the cliffs it was obvious that like perhaps the best way to do
this would be to actually get the local climbers involved and to have them help us out and also learn about all of these interesting things about the plants that exist here when it starts growing and spreading the ice plant can destroy a habitat quite fast so Thiago decided to act quick and get a project together he reached out to sus that portuges Banica to help build the proposal and after submitting he got the green light from ecnf the local park authorities allowing him to be able to work in this protected area the first step was to try and map each area to understand where the ice plant was and also where the endangered plants were and the best tool for this was a drone we started off by
using the Phantom 4 drone together with the Pix 4D software which the company Licensed To Us for free which is super cool and it has been a big help across our different projects and to make sense of the results we got some help from yakob a pretty dedicated Mossy Earth member so what the process is from here is that I am delivered a map from M Earth and then I will segment the map into a lot of these small polygons as you can see here and these polygons are segmented by the algorithm looks at the color and the shape of this picture and then determines a lot of small polygons to segma it into and when this has been done I will then manually look at the image and I will classify give it
some examples of the for example this euphobia plant here and this one here and then I will feed these examples into the algorithm and the algorithm is then able to show to uh to process these uh examples that I give it and then it's able to give us a map like this he then further refines this by adding some points in the center of the polygon and then congregating them to a single point per Bush to finally create this heat map here this process can then be repeated for other endemics and also invasives over time we found that this was a great way to Map aoras and find ice plants but the convolu was a bit trickier we also have pretty restricted flying times due to the Falcons that breed on these Cliffs but it is of
course really important not to disturb them when the time finally came to get working we got all the help we needed from the local community with people such as francisko who is a self-thought naturalist who wrote several books on the Flora and the caves of the area he was an invaluable research to help us navigate this Cliff ecosystems and then we also got a ton of help from the climbing Community you see these Cliffs here are quite the climbing Paradise because of all this lovely Limestone and climbers spend a lot of time here this has meant that it is crucial to have them on board so we try to reach as many climbers as possible and ask them to spread the word about the situation and our
project our message was well received and willingly distributed which means that in the future we can count on the climbing Community to help us keep an eye on the ice plant and also be mindful of the protected species as they create new climbing routes and access paths As Time passed our removal event started to make a dent in the problem but the ice plant is also quite capable of cascading down Cliffs which is why the next step was to get our climbing gear and attack them on the Cliff face now before we show you the vertical removals I think some of you might be wondering why do we care so much about these particular plants I mean these plants are so picky they have such a difficult life and they
are so easily beaten by these plants why not just let them be and let it be done and I think I have the perfect example for you so when learning more about deoria we found out that there is some ongoing research looking at molecules extracted from this plant that have the potential to help treat multi-drug resistant cancers now that's pretty cool so it isn't always obvious why a particular species is worth preserving but what is abundantly clear is that uniqueness and diversity are really worth protecting in the long run especially from Human introduced threats like the ice plant and that is why I'm so happy that here at Moss Earth we get to spend the time to pay attention to these species and also to do something
about it and the only reason we can do something is because of our Mossy Earth membership we essentially have a month subscription that you can sign up to and we will then use the money that we gather from our members to implement projects that range from Coral Reef restoration to ground squirrel reintroductions regreening volcanic deserts and even Rew Wilding this fragile bit of land we bought in the Amazon all our work will be visible through reports in your account through these update videos here on YouTube and also our lovely monthly Field Report and if you want to dig a bit deeper we post a quarterly financial report as well as all our major project transactions on our website in the transparency section
so if you'd like to support our work if you'd like to support this project and all the other projects that we do then please consider heading over to moss. Earth and if you just want to learn a bit more about our membership then you can also watch the channel trailer here on the YouTube channel now let's get on with the vertical removals so we are here at uh our uh project area in part Portugal um the Sea Cliffs of kabell and we've uh been doing some uh invasive uh plant removal work at the cliffs um this is uh the fourth day uh we're doing this and um so I'm here with uh olle he's our uh rope uh wizard uh who's responsible for all the
complex uh things we have to do with ropes OE how often do you reckon we've gone down this path by now uh too many times don't need to elaborate on that so we're uh walking down to access the cliff area now uh one of the challenges of uh working in this area is that we have to come down this little path every time carrying all the gear with us yes we'll just be going along here and there's some sections where you don't have ice plant and then others where you have some big patches and that's where we'll have to upsell down uh which I'm going to use to get to that pouch down there and uh Ollie is already busy setting up the next anchor and we're making the most uh of the last bits of
sunlight so as we're going down we have to be quite careful because this is one of the places where we have both the Euphoria and the ice plant so as you can see there's like these little baby uh euphorbias dotting uh the cliff and so we need to be careful not to step on them and also that the Rope doesn't hit them so that's the first uh tiny patch of ice Bland removed today we have a lot to go but uh we got started so far so good uh it's we have a um a good group of volunteers here today so it means there's several people uh working at the same time uh so it's just a matter of managing all of that but we've already uh got uh some of the patches done and we just got to keep going until while we
have uh sunlight so one of the things we're finding here along the cliffs as well is that there's a lot of trash both in the middle of the ice plant and just lying around as you can see here bunch of uh beer bottles um and yeah we do try and collect what we can but we might uh need to come back with uh more volunteers to help uh clean the cliffs so this is uh one of the patches that we managed to remove yesterday with the help of our volunteers and what we do is that we put them on a pile here with the roots facing up so that they dry out and behind me here we have an area where uh we had one of these piles and it's dried out and all of them are dead which is exactly what we want and now we'll just
have to wait and make sure that the same happens with the other piles just finished working on this Cliff section uh all is in the back there uh removing one of the anchors and we're just going to keep going uh East um and whenever we find another patch of ice plant we'll just build another anchor and take care of that I always find it really amazing that we have people who just decide to spend their Sunday helping these little plants um and I think they're they're enjoying it as well so I'm I'm really happy that people also get to know this place if you check out the views it's it's incredible and sharing that is really cool so we're just wrapping up for the day um it was our last day this week of
uh removing ice spun from The Cliffs and we've made great progress I think uh we covered probably some 8 800 meters or so of uh Coastline and um there's still work to do but uh it was uh a great week we of progress in total we cleaned up around 25,000 square m across 900 M of Coastline and if you'd like to see more of this work we've just launched a new channel called M Earth field notes here you'll find Project discussion videos and Vlogs such as this one where Adriana visits our flooded Forest during the biggest flood recorded to date or thiago's Adventures cleaning up these Cliffs together with frish kuang Aldi and all these other characters these videos are not narrated and the editing
is very light so you'll see a lot more of what happens on the ground some will be quite short and some will be long if it makes sense this will essentially be our low pressure YouTube channel for those who want to dive deep into our projects now when the vertical removals Happened One Thing became clear the Phantom drone did not work when it came to mapping the vertical areas so Thiago shipped it off to ISA to map seagrass in Scotland which generally tends to be nice and flat and then he got himself an upgrade that was a bit more suited to the job and so he continued to spend some time going up and down the cliff often on his own at weird times to try and continue the mapping and plan where
to strike next and this is when Jon came into the picture he reached out to us to do an internship and a master thesis on one of our projects and we've been putting him to good use so what do you have to say about the conditions now I think it's not meant to be today that we will fully up the cliffs the rain is not on our side and then there were two of them going up and down the cliffs day and night seemingly in all kinds of weather to continue all of the mapping and discuss the ins and outs of trying to do so in this super steep environment and during their walks they also found many other interesting things such as this caterpiller which fed exclusively onoria which is another argument in the you never know why they're important list but
Jan's work will also be looking at the future I'm trying to map The Cliffs and um with that I will try to understand what are the specific characteristics that those endangered plants need to live because as you can see right behind me there are no uh end dangerous plants and I want to figure out what are the characteristics that make them live in those places in the cliffs and not right here for example this work will help us figure out the status of the endangered plants and we'll also lead to the creation of an ecological niche model which will essentially tell us what these plants needs to live and that could open the door to some potential propagation and reintroduction ideas assuming we find new areas that match
the ones that they like over here this is one of the most beautiful and unique places that I know so to be able to work to protect and preserve it's just absolutely mind-blowing it's it's incredible so a huge thank you to everyone who's been breaking their backs to remove the ice plant and help protect these species and a huge thank you to our M Earth members that make all of this possible we'll be keeping you posted with the Regeneration of the Native flora and with our progress in this project so I hope you stick around until next time cheers
