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this is our flooded Forest project where we restored the flooding regime to an old flood plane Forest to bring back the wildlife populations that rely on this ecosystem and so far the transformation has been mindblowing to witness and this year we've had the most incredible season yet from the season long ice fueled floods to the biggest surge in the danu that this project has ever witnessed all the way to an incredible biodiversity boom unlike anything we have seen before this year really delivered it all and it far exceeded our already high expectations we've been flooding this forest for a few years now and somehow every flood has been unique in how it played out and this year we have an
extra special set of conditions that has led a certain group of species to Boom like never before we get into this boom it's time to look at the winter and where all this water came from because this winter was special it delivered a very rare winter flood which froze and created this icy magical landscape crucially for us it also loaded the soil of the forest with a lot more water than usual which meant that when the simulated flood started there was a better chance for us to have water in the forest for longer and this is how it looked like early in the spring it's always super nice to be here this time of the year this early into the season and yeah there's a lot less plant
life and of course there's a lot less Wildlife out and about but the weather is absolutely fantastic and crucially there are no mosquitoes but the biggest difference compared to last year is that around this time around the 20th of March last year this forest was dry it was bone dry and if you'll remember the last video that we made we showed you that a certain group of species had to resort to Extreme Measures to try to reproduce this was us one year ago desperately Gathering the egg clutches that the agile frogs had laid in a quickly diminishing small muddy puddle in the middle of the channel just before the actual floods arrived this year however they have plenty of opportunity
so now I'd like to go in into this Forest here and look underneath the surface to see what we can find and I did not have to go very far to see that this year we have a completely different story so here we have the uh first clutch in our search and it's a really beautiful one essentially this uh this amphibian lays their eggs in a ball around a uh a twig or a branch like this one here and it's really cool to see from an underwater perspective it essentially forms these little clouds that are just sort of Clinging On to these thin branches and uh yeah it's a it's amazing to see but for me the special thing really is that this time last year we are rescuing a lot of
these clutches in that sad little mud puddle and trying to move them to you know make sure that they could hold on a little bit longer until the flood would arrive and this year they seem to have much better conditions to lay their eggs so hopefully this will lead to a boom in their population these clutches are from the agile frog or Rana dalmatina this time we found them all over the place in both the flooded forest and in our Channel and I must say I personally felt a lot of satisfaction seeing this after the whole situation from last year then as we continued the search we started finding some more egg clutches with a very different look here we have these strings these long
beautiful strings I'm going to see if I can lift one a little bit just so you can see it out of the water as well and here we go look how beautiful that is and what a special way to lay your eggs and underwater they just flutter especially with this little current they flutter as if they're in the breeze it's a yeah it's really beautiful to see to the trained eye this should be quite familiar as they are no more than the egg clutches of the common toad or Buel bofl and I'm must to say whoever called it common really did this toad a disservice because it might be abundant but it really stands out to me as an artist that is far from common look at these beautiful curves and arches it
really gives the strange sight of a flooded Forest an even more mystical look and in some places there were signs of the impending arrival of spring already as some of the tadpoles were beginning their perilous life journey by exiting their eggs and when I say perilous I mean it I was lucky to have this special encounter in our channel here we have a young Smooth N or loton vulgaris munching away on an early season snack they are mostly nocturnal so the odds of seeing it in action during the day aren't too high so this was pretty lucky and I think that examples like this one really show that by restoring a degraded habitat you can benefit all kinds of species in different ways for some you're going to
create habitats to lay eggs in and for others you're going to create a much needed meal in a time when the insects are yet to Boom but we're not doing this just for the animals of course plants are also a crucial piece of the puzzle so this here is exactly what we want to be seeing in terms of plant progression in our Wetland because these are Carrick species they are Wetland species and they're super important for the panonian root fall and they've spread to these areas that don't even FL flood that often like this bit here only floods maybe once a year for about a week but it's been enough to start to get rid of some of the invas and convert them into this but in the areas that flood more
frequently they've been spreading like crazy so one of those places is here next to the channel and these areas here especially where there's been a bit more disturbance they've been thriving and yeah it's it's really great to see and even though we still have plenty of uh invasive non-native species these ones are starting to uh become the majority but you don't have to take our word for it and to prove this point further a few weeks later we received the results from the monitoring by the researchers from comminus University who monitor the surrounding Meadows as part of the implementation of the European Union Life microtus 2 project that BRZ manages and that this flooded Forest is a part
of now this report might look a bit daunting at first but it is actually quite simple it essentially measures the plant species abundance in these four Meadows here and it does so using the brown blanket scale that is quite commonly used for vegetation surveys it goes from r or rare across a few categories all the way to five which is nearly 100% coverage we have a lot of species on this list so let's focus on the two crucial types the invasive ones and the Wetland species on the invasive side of things we have a mix of Lance leafed Asters the AG here means aggregate indicating that this is a grouping of invasives they reduced significantly in Meadows 1 and four stayed the same in Meadow 2 and
increased slightly in Meadow 3 then we have the other major invasive the giant Golden Rod which also belongs to the Aster family it has been reducing significantly across all Meadows so overall the invasives are in retreat in the first two years of this project then among the Wetland species we have the common Reed which maintained its presence in Meadows 1 2 and 4 and increased in Meadow 3 we have the sge species which I showed you on the ground just now such as the riverbank sge CarX riparia which increased its presence in Meadows 2 and three and showed up for the first time in Meadow 1 or the Slender sge CarX gracilis which in this past year also spread into Meadows one
and three for the first time so overall it's been really positive to see this and remember this is not the core of our Wetland these are the adjacent Meadows which flood rarely if at all it seems that the extra underground water can have this impact alone and it is a sign that our Wetland has an expanded reach but it's not just the small plants which are changing and we also have a lots of trees growing inside or on the borders of the forest I mean look at this mini little jungle that I'm walking through and it's it's really cool to see that uh we don't always have to plant the trees sometimes we just need to give them the right conditions and I think that the extra water that we're now
providing this Forest is really helping with this uh natural regeneration but in the open areas where natural succession is a bit slower brw also planted some trees so the trees planted last year seem to be doing pretty good I think quite a few of them survived the whole two seasons and uh yeah that's really great to think that you know we'll have a forest also here next to the channel and as I walked further in the upper Forest things looked even better so over here on the other end of the Wetland we have exactly what we want this area to transition to nice wet patches of carriots and it's also really beautiful underwater it forms this sort of vertical habitat that resembles a kelp forest somewhat so I think that's
pretty cool and I've actually been hearing uh the European fire bellied toad around here somewhere so I'm going to go try to go look for them to see if uh I can film some for you I ended up finding a few sneaky ones here or there such as this one here hiding really quietly just under the surface but it was nothing compared with what was to come later in the season besides them I was able to film some lovely snails and a few insects as well a few weeks went by and we finally got round to implementing one of the last parts of this project you see the core of this Wetland is around 85.6 hectares with our amazing Partners bras owning most of it but around 12.5% was still owned by the
government in the weird co-ownership model that they have here in Slovakia and this can always pose a risk because politics are volatile and Minds change but Bros won the right to buy the remaining 12.5% of the Wetland so we Rend to supply them with the necessary € 31,000 to do so because this will secure the future of this place for a really long time and it is a crucial step in the long-term viability of this project and the way we were able to have this money ready to go for such an important moment is because of our amazing Mossy Earth members that contribute a small amount every month to our projects these days we have set up our very own Rew Wilding teams in Indonesia Ecuador
Scotland and Portugal and we also continue to work with great Partners like bruss here near the danu among many others our Rew Wilding philosophy is based on data and results our processes are transparent and our outcomes are clearly reported to our members but above all I think it is really fun and rewarding for all of us to get together and do something meaningful to make our landscape a bit Wilder so if that sounds like something for you then please consider becoming a member at moss. Earth the link will be in the description and in a pinned comment down below now let's look ahead a few months to see what we can find so today is the 28th of May and uh I wanted to come in
check the Wetland again and this place looks like an absolute jungle this time of the year it's uh it's really nice to see but um yeah there's always the question as to whether it's there's still some water so let's let's have a look so there's been water here throughout spring and that is really great news for the amphibians to get to get a full uh reproduction cycle in so I'm going to go switch to the underwater camera and uh let's go let's go explore what this uh what this Forest what this Wetland looks like in a more mature time in the season and I found a mesmerizing underwater world complete with all sorts of aquatic plants algae and of course a lot of snails and for those of you which wondered whether they
are actually aquatic then look at this they are like happy little aliens climbing these plants in search for food and I also saw them slowly gliding on these clouds of algae and it gave our Channel quite an ethereal fairy tale look that is once more completely different from what we had earlier in the season and then I started finding all the fish at first they were quite jumpy and very hard to film as they quickly sprinted among the reads and Aquatic vegetation but bit by bit I was able to get closer to the point where they were within a few centim from me which was really special these fish were everywhere including the forest but they were harder to film there because the water level was a bit lower and it is great to see them here
as it is really important habitat for them to reproduce you see much like a coral reef this place acts like a nursery for fish which are much more protected and sheltered here than they would be in the river or the more open side branches and then I started finding all of the fire belly toades that make this wonderful Symphony and for the first time I was able to film the mid song regardless of how silly they look it was really great to see them here and in other places in the danu flood plane as they are threatened and vulnerable in large parts of their range the summer flood was not as powerful as we thought it might be but then a big flooding event hit Germany severe flooding in
southern Germany has killed at least five people now and forced thousands to flee their homes this is not something to be happy about in any way nine people died and as this water made it down the river it could have killed many more but when it reached this part of the danu the flood plane system including our forest was able to show its flood mitigation potential when it took on a mighty amount of water this is a service that this place can do for humans at no cost do the Wetland species that live here it is a really important example of how healthy and thriving wet land ecosystems are important to have in our landscape and why we should consider returning more areas to this condition
this project has matured it has um it has stabilized and it's been really amazing to see the transformation of this area the return of this Wetland and the Rew Wilding of this habitat and it's been really cool to see it especially because it's the product of our work it's just uh mindblowing that we can help nature in this way it's just so much fun and it feels great that this is actually something that we can do but for now I just want to say huge thank you a huge thank you to you for supporting our work um and if you don't yet support our work then please consider becoming a moss Earth member it's it's pretty cheap to join but the money goes a long way in creating projects like this one so thank you for allowing us to do this work
it's um it's really incredible until next time cheers
