Natural History Wanderings

MongaBay reports

Tony Rinaudo had been attempting to reforest degraded land in Niger in the 1980s at a rate of 6,000 trees a year, but most of them died. While driving to a village hosting one such project, he caught sight of what he initially thought was a bush. Upon closer inspection, though, it turned out to be the inspiration he was looking for.“

In that instant, everything changed because I realized it’s not a bush, it’s not even a weed. That’s a tree,” he says, growing out of an old stump. The degraded land he was attempting to reforest in fact contained “millions and millions” of them, which, if protected from browsing animals and encouraged to grow, would sprout trees to rebuild the region’s depleted soil and water tables, and provide nutrients and partial shade that farmers’ crops could grow better in, via a system called agroforestry.

Read more at  Harnessing ‘invisible forests in plain view’ to reforest the world – Conservation news