Little Forests Kingston

The KSS Sweet Grass Circle made a wonderful video for our gofundme page. Yesterday after launching the video we raised an additional $1344, putting total funds raised at $7,839… we’re over halfway to our goal! Keep spreading the word.

Agenda Saturday April 24

Zoom link for tomorrow (Saturday April 24): https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81195507009?pwd=cHdyaVpFUVNrRmVBYmdnR1lWcVZrQT09

Collecting data. What data do we want to collect? In our last meeting, Maureen set the context for tomorrow’s discussion around data. She’ll also bring her insights from her data discussion with a few people from the Nature Canada networking group.

Watering the seedlings. Bob & Marinus are presenting their ideas on a circular Little Forest designs that include a swale, irrigation and pond for storing rainwater for irrigation (with a side benefit that they raise & maintain the surrounding water table).

Updates

Budget: Global Affairs Canada wants to know how much it costs to plant a Little Forest. Heather from CanPlant shared their budget with us & we’ll be sharing our draft budget with Global Affairs Canada once we narrow refine our costs. We did update our tree order which increased our costs from Verbinnen’s significantly (turns out they hadn’t included some of our key species like White Oak, Bassword etc…) as they were a larger size. I have to input all the numbers into the spreadsheet so it back calculates cost for each Little Forest & we can see if any key species are still missing. With HST, the Vebinnen’s part of our order is now $8289.99.

Tree protection: Sandra spoke with Wisatek (the supplier Sebastian discovered). They now have an American arm & one of their product developers work there. Sandra shared our species list & we’re waiting to hear back about pricing & recommendations. Joanne is also exploring Wattle Fencing for the KSS site as the main purpose of the fence at KSS is to protect the forest from lawnmowers & demarcate it for people.

Sourcing: We’re paid a deposit of $1100 of $4548.67 (with HST) on Verbinnen’s order. Total is $4548.67 (with HST). Species we still need to source (or propagate) below. Teresa has reached out to another wholesale supplier to get their species list. Species spreadsheet. All orders in Ordering folder.

Lakeside design: Jerry revised the Lakeside plan after Joanne suggested a sitting circle in the forest. Similar to the idea of the sacred circle in Marinus & Bob’s diagram… great mind think alike! No pond yet, but again in another coincidence Lakeside reached out to Utilities Kingston last week to ask about ponds at Lakeside & they were keen on the idea.

Earth Day planting at HWY 15. Three of the donated walnut seedlings found a home at HWY 15 yesterday! Marinus joined in & walked the land to better understand the possibilities of the site.

Soil testing: With the stay-at-home order we’re delaying soil testing until June.

How does climate change impact forests?

“If you think of these species as members of a family, the question is, will some families break apart, or will they travel together? We might be talking about these families breaking apart.” ~Songlin Fei, Forest Ecologist 

Do we need to migrate soil microbiology as well? Range is primarily determined by climate (prevailing temperature and moisture regimes) followed by soil type, soil moisture, and seed dispersal mechanisms. Underground networks are responsible for helping trees move up hills and mountains by creating "soil highways." Studies with differing soil variables (water-holding capacity, pH, permeability, texture, organic matter content) modelled distribution of tree species following climate change showed that soil factors were important for species to achieve successful range shift (permeability, organic matter, pH, CEC, % clay & bulk density). They also found that the soil microbiome could be encouraging tree migration to protect heat-sensitive tree species and that local or regional soil properties may hinder their migratory response.

Some tree species are retreating, others are advancing. White Spruce (Picea glauca) is currently common in our area 6E-15 Picton. With climate change it’s predicted to become uncommon (such as in 6E-6 Barrie). This Lake Simcoe climate study Retreating species climate stu– predicts which species will retreat, which will advance into the area and which will endure. Retreating species included: White spruce, Balsam fir, Eastern white cedar, Paper birch, Tamarack and Trembling aspen. They recommend different strategies to deal with the uncertainties of climate change such as selecting seeds adapted to multiple future climates, planting a mix of local seedlings and seeds from multiple seed zones in the hopes that the best-adapted seed source will thrive.

Forest resilience under climate change. The conclusion of this literature review on the capacity of forests to recover after disturbance. diversity asks good questions we might want to consider in our data discussion. 1) should resilience be based on the recovery of a particular species or developmental stage, or on the functionality of the whole ecosystem? 2) What level of resilience is acceptable? Complete recovery to previous conditions, less, or recovery to a different stage [83]? 3) Is the level of past resilience enough or should we aim at higher levels, i.e., transformative resilience [84]? And, 4) because forests will be recovering under a changing environment, and they are slow to adapt, could we accelerate that process with management practices? Particularly, we will need to address fundamental issues like deciding how to frame resilience, determining what level of resilience is necessary to cope with future environmental changes, and considering the possibility of transformative resilience.