Update #13: 78% survival rate in the 1st year / September 13, 2022

As you can imagine, we're pleased with the progress so far, as are our local team and forestry engineers. It is an amazing achievement and data below show we can run a reforestation operation in Lurë adhering to the industry standards while keeping the operation economically incredibly lean.

Transparency is a core principle for Trees for Lurë and we must provide as much information as possible to our supporters and long-term partners from all around the world.

An essential part of any reforestation project should be monitoring activities, tracking the survival rate and yearly growth and identifying potential problems with young trees.

Without publishing this information, there is no way to evaluate project performance regarding reforestation success or failure and its economic viability.

Mia & Max (@wege_wagen) helping with maintenance and monitoring, Spring 2022

78% Survival rate

We are delighted with our results regarding the survival rate after the first vegetation period. A survival rate of 78% is above the widely accepted minimum of 70%, considered a success.

We planted trees from 3 different suppliers in Autumn 2021, you can read more about the selection process in Update #10. We have done this to spread the risk and evaluate the survivability of the available planting material from Albanian suppliers.

Here are the gathered data on 10th September 2022:

	Fushë-Krujë	Burrel	Korçë	Total
Planted	1100	1018	594	2712
Dead	250	171	182	603
Survival rate	77.22%	83,20%	69,36%	77.77%
Growth	1–8 cm (10 samples)	1–8 cm (12 samples)	1–3 cm (4 samples)
Summary	The issue was the planting area as some of the trees happened to be planted in areas with excessive water saturation. This negatively influences the survival rate despite the trees performing incredibly well.	The issue was the snow/wind damage. These trees were much taller than the other saplings, therefore more sensitive to the snow and wind damage.	These trees were too young to be planted in the harsh conditions in Lurë, resulting in poor performance.

Problems and lessons learned

The crucial part of monitoring is identifying problems and learning from them. While our death rate is acceptable, the simple truth is that 603 trees died, and it is essential to understand why it happened.

1) Excessive water saturation

This year has seen a lot of rainfall in Lurë. There have been long periods of heavy rain oversaturating the planting area.

Our planting area is on the hill, separated into two parts by the gravel/stone road. Due to heavy rain and the road functioning as drainage from the upper part, a few temporary streams have formed on the planting area’s lower part. The trees planted in this area suffered from water oversaturation.

This year’s area is much larger than last year’s at 6.25ha. We will identify potential areas unsuitable for planting and mark them accordingly to minimise this problem.

2) Poor planting

Correct planting technique is crucial for tree survival. Even perfect saplings can suffer a high death rate when planted incorrectly.

Early on, we recognised that we did not plant some trees correctly. In spring, the team was in Lurë to correct as many trees as possible and deal with the weather damage.

Issues we found:

planting too shallow, exposing the top of the root system as well as compromising the stability of the taller trees
planting too deep, covering the young/bottom branches
planting without taking the sapling out of the plastic pots (hard to believe, but yes, it happened)

Detail of exposed root system due to shallow planting

We are changing how we will plant in 2022. We will increase the number of staff experienced in planting trees to educate, help and monitor volunteers. We are also offloading a large portion of planting to the local team as they’re well educated and have extensive experience with planting.

3) Weather damage

The trees we bought from the nursery in Burrel were significantly taller than the other saplings.

While these trees are doing well, and the survival rate is the highest among the three groups, they are susceptible to snow and wind damage, especially when planted too shallow.

We found many trees pushed to the ground by the weight of snow and had to correct this during our spring activities.

This experience leads us to change our suppliers for the 2022 planting and to prefer smaller, younger trees that are more resistant to the snow and wind.

4) Unsuitable saplings

Trees from the nursery in Korçë didn’t survive the harsh conditions in Lurë very well. These trees were donated to us.

Despite being within the specification for the saplings of that age, it is clear that saplings with only one vegetation period are not suitable for planting.

This information is vital for us. We won’t be planting saplings this young saplings anymore. We are also preparing trees nursery to allow saplings to stay for minimum of two vegetation periods there before planting.

What’s next?

As you can see, we had a fair share of success and failure, which is only natural when dealing with nature and weather. We had an opportunity to learn from our year of planting which allows us implement changes to mitigate the problems listed above.

With this experience, we’re raising the bar, and we set our goal for this year to 10 000 trees.

On behalf of the whole team,
Pavel