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what an incredible place I mean on this side here all around me we have the vastness of this Black Desert and then we have this thin strip of grass and Birchwood that has somehow managed to survive here the contrast it's just crazy it's mind-blowing to see and it represents perfectly what Iceland is undergoing right now currently we have mostly this desert like landscape that you see over there but in the future it could become a lot more like this grasslands forests and wetlands and in this video today I want to tell you about our new project that we are starting in this desert right here I want to catch you up on the reforestation work that we have been doing okay let me hit pause there I went on a bit of a desert inspired speech
that took way too long to get to the point so let me keep things simple in this video we will be looking at three time Horizons the past which is roughly this planting season the medium-term which can be roughly 2024 and the longer term which will be 2025 and onwards each one will be a chapter in today's story so let's get cracker we've said ourselves the goal to plant 1 million trees in Iceland and this is a bit of an aesthetic number for communication purposes because what we really want is to create forests but nevertheless it works and for 2023 our goal was to plant 200,000 trees together with the islandic forestry service right here in shord dalur so this here is the western side
of our planting area and as you can see it's absolutely gorgeous I mean look at all of these yellows Orange oranges and reds it's completely transformed this landscape and this time of the year it looks mindblowing and yeah what the colors should also tell you of course is that this is the end of the planting season it's getting really cold I mean I'm wearing my uh best uh home knit Icelandic sweater for warmth so it's that level of cold so we decided to come here for one of the last days of planting to show you a little bit how the trees are planted and also why it's really tricky to plant them in the right place because they have a little bit of a goldilock Zone you see normally we
would base a lot of our planning on tree density because most of the ground in our planting areas is homogeneous however our planting area here is the opposite of that it's covered in gravel which is prone to frost heaving and kills the trees as well as vegetation like crowberry bilbury and Woolly Willow which are quite rooty and hard to plant in and then there is the Moss that is good for planting but only at certain depths so to properly showcase the struggle that is planting here we joined will from Delta forest and his crew of Planters so that you can see some of this work firsthand what we're doing here is area planting and we're specifically going after the best micro
sites for the trees so some areas it's going to be a bit more dense fine some areas is going to be really Spar also fine it's not like forestry stuff where they want rigid lines 2 by two it doesn't matter what the ground is the tree goes in exactly 200 CM after the next one um so yeah I mean density does matter but in places like this where it's just hard to get trees to grow I think you want to be worry more about the microcytes and where the individual trees are going than the density and this meant that when Ellie was trying to assess the results at the various polygons density was simply an unusable metric this puts a lot more responsibility in the hands of the planting teams and it means that it's
crucial that the individual Planters are able to find the right places to plant what will calls micro sighting but that is easier said than done the thing is and they say plant in the shallow of moss but it's like where is it man how are we supposed to fit 200,000 trees in this if we're only planting in the shallower Moss will has a point here the Planters are often stuck between a rock and a hard place and this was great to hear actually you see we like to get the facts whether they are pretty or not and will who follows our projects here on YouTube he knows this he wants things to work well so he felt it was important to be candid about these challenges in the long run this will allow the process to continue
being transparent and to improve in the coming years you see the work this planting season suffered a lot from a tricky Dynamic where the planning crew would come and Survey a site but they wouldn't be able to test their depth of the moss in all places as this was simply unfeasible so the Planters were left to do a lot of the micros sighing themselves which as you saw can be quite tricky in addition to that we had some bad weather in September which made things a bit more tricky one of the 4x4s from one of the crews kept breaking down which is why will was brought in October just as the snow was starting to fall all of these challenges meant that we planted 181,182 and infrastructure costs which
meant that we essentially paid around € per tree planted and to put this into perspective in places like Scotland we will often plant a tree at three or 4 lbs so even if a few of these trees were planted in a less than desirable situation the overall project was still very coste efficient so I would like to say that our work this year definitely got a passing grade but it could be better and based on this we did some planning meetings with the ifs team and we concluded that the best is to slow things down a bit next year to allow for some more detailed mapping of the sites so that it's easier for the Planters to do their work this will also allow for the Improvement of some much needed
infrastructure to fend off some unwanted visitors okay so over there we can see the Enemy Number One that these trees face which is of course the sheep that roam the highlands in the summer and with this lens we're actually able to see a group of sheep on the other side of this Valley where some of our trees are also planted so that's not too good but they're really difficult to manage here in yellow you can see the existing fence that needs some repairs and in blue where a new fence is planned the Damage Done by sheep has not been extensive but it does Merit some attention and that wraps up 2023 I think it was a successful result when you take into account all of the different challenges but for 2024 we want to
switch things up a bit now we've been on the lookout for some exciting opportunities to restore new areas which is why we posted a small notice through the Icelandic Farmers Association they have this little newspaper that has quite an audience in Iceland and we were super excited when we got a lead So today we're checking out a potential new project area that is uh in the valley between our existing project area and heckla and uh we're meeting with two people who decided to buy a piece of land here and uh to try to restore it just for the sake of bringing nature back which is pretty cool this area is occupied by about 25 farms in the past but in 1882 a huge Sandstorm destroyed
it all there were about 2,000 sheep and 2,000 horses that were lost in one go the storm was absolutely devastating and that thin strip that I showed you in the beginning of the video was all that was left somehow it was sheltered from The Wind by the mountains in the back which led to this very strange pizza slice shape of trees and grass surrounded by Black Desert now this was of course an absolute freak event but one which would have been a lot less serious if the landscape had more forests to block the progression of the sand and the ash which is of course where we come into the picture how come you have this land how you know what's the background story we wanted to have a land in the countryside where we would
plant trees have space for ourselves so and this opportunity came up this was a farm that went backr 10 years ago and had been owned by a bank ever since so all of the housing is in very bad shape and that's why the price was right for us to afford it and part of it is not suitable for normal farming all of the area here in the lava but it's suitable for other interesting Pro like that the ones that we are talking about now so you just buy it privately the two of you and you want to bring it back now oh that's very cool they showed us around the land and over the next few weeks we made a plan together on how to go about restoring the area we will start from the back of the property where
conditions are more sheltered and the land has already been fertilized so this here is where we hope to be planting some trees next year and as you can see it looks a lot better than the part up there where we were next to the narrow strip of birch and the main reason is the Lupine which apparently was air dropped here around 20 years ago and what it does is it binds nitrogen in the soil and creates better conditions for the Birch to thrive and some trees have already been planted here such as uh this little fella here and they're managing quite okay um but yeah we hope to do a lot more here next year so that we can transform this loopin landscape into a proper Birchwood the goal is to
plant the first 25 hectares next year so that should be around 32,000 trees to kick things off also in 2024 the area nearest to the river will be seated with a mixture of seed prepared by the soil conservation agency to improve the conditions and make it ready for planting next year the whole plan has been reviewed by the islandic forestry service which should help make it watertight and what I think is really cool about this new project is that we're working with a very degraded area that could gr from Barren grounds to a thriving forest in a relatively short period of time here in this shot of a nearby area you can see that it's possible these here are young birchwoods next to what is effectively a desert now
that will keep us busy in 2024 but longer term we are looking for something big to sink our teeth into which is why for 2025 we've been considering two ideas to hire someone full-time in Iceland and to buy some land let's start with the land because if we decide to do that we will need that full-time person anyway and I think I'd like to start by introducing you to our hubs currently at Moss Earth we are prioritizing five locations where we are building a bigger presence in Portugal in the mirror catchment with Matt and Thiago in the rainforest of Ecuador with Freddy and Adriana in the coral reefs of Indonesia with Ellie and yudi in the highlands of Scotland with Isa and logically also in
Iceland given that we have worked here for a few years in each of these locations we're essentially hiring and developing teams to take on landscape scale reing and that often means buying Strate IC bits of land so far we've only done so in Ecuador but it immediately felt like the right move we had some skin in the game this open doors for us and we could use it as a stepping stone for bigger and wider projects this is the logic we want to apply to Iceland in 20125 and before we touch on what we are looking for I would just like to remind you that the only reason we can do all of this work is because of our Mossy Earth members that support our projects with a monthly subscription we try to
keep everything as transparent as possible by showing many of our project actions on our M Earth field notes Channel by reporting everything in our transparency dashboard our Field Report our financial reports and also the regular updates from our biologists that all members can engage with it's fun but above all it's really impactful so if you'd like to join then please consider becoming a member at moss. Earth now during the coming year we will be looking at which areas might be suitable for such a landscape scale project and we've been mostly looking at two intervention types one is the reforestation type work we'll be doing in 2024 in super Barren areas and the other is Wetlands you see Iceland has a
ton of beautiful Wetlands but many of them were drained with subsidy money and the way that they managed to dry up all of those Wetlands was through these huge ditches here I mean look at the size of this it's pretty much a trench and what's incredible is that they have them in every single field you have one here one there and they just keep on going and they do a really good job at drying up this area I've never seen ditches like these before I visited Iceland you can literally stand in them and it feels quite surreal now these days there are subsidies to fix them which is why we probably don't need to go and fund those types of projects however if it were to be included in a land that we would be
managing we could make sure that it would become a proper bird paradise so this is what a restored Wetland looks like and as you can see it's pretty solid and over there you can see the agricultural Fields a lot of the Wetland would have looked like this before but we couldn't learn exactly how they restored it because the farm up there that owns all of this land has changed hands in the meantime but we know that this was restored by people and it's really interesting to see that uh this is a possible outcome for one of our projects now to do some research we visited several wetlands and even though it was definitely off season we still saw plenty of birds including a distant glimpse of a gear Falcon that was
praying on the smaller birds so today we spent a day going between Wetlands like this one right here and all I can say is that they're mind blowingly beautiful they come in all sorts of colors and shapes and it's really amazing to see and even though it's not the right season to see different bird species that would be the spring we managed to get lucky and caught quite a few glimpses of different species but above all what today has taught me is that these places really are worth protecting they're so rich they're so biodiverse and I can't wait to for us to find the right project to start bringing some of these ecosystems back now the next step in this work is to research a good
opportunity and for that we need some help which is why we want to build a network we're putting a form in the description where you can leave us your contact and how you think you could help with this work I don't I'd also love to plan a small Meetup the next time we go to Iceland for work and this would be the contact list for that as well and finally if you're just finishing a degree in biology or ecology if you're full of energy and you want to take on a big challenge then be sure to fill in the form too as we are gathering leads for a full-time role to represent us in Iceland the only caveat is that you have to be living in Iceland I'm really excited about everything that we are
Brewing up here in Iceland there's so many ideas and so many things to do and yeah if you're excited as well please remember that the best way to support this project and everything that we are doing here and everywhere else is to become a member at moss. Earth and also don't forget there are forms in the description to help us with your ideas we are hiring someone here and of course we'll keep you up to date on how it goes with purchasing a bit of desert to get our hands on and restore until next time cheers
