Restoration Incidents

Ecosystem restoration and conservation is hard work and fraught with challenges like forest fires, droughts or floods. Plant-for-the-Planet works to minimize and mitigate these risks, for example by training our team in fire mitigation and preparing fire breaks on our sites or harnessing satellite data to detect fires. For reasons of transparency, we document relevant incidents here.

Incidents are documented here only after they are resolved, that way we ensure that we can correctly estimate the total extent of the incident.

Flooding

Date

06.10.2023

Site

Las Americas

Size

51.2 ha

After several days of heavy rain we observed moderate flooding in our sites Las Americas 1, 6 and 7. The peak of the flooding was around the 6th of October. Across all these sites, a total of 51.2 ha were affected by some degree of standing water, in most cases limited to a few centimetres or less and limited to a few days. The most heavily affected area was Las Americas 7a. In that area, we planted a mix of tree species specialized on growing in contexts with large amounts of water. Therefore, we do not expect that we will experience excess mortality as a result of this flooding. In most cases, this added water was at levels where it was more likely to be beneficial than harmful for the plants.

The maps were made by using SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data (vv and vh bands) from Sentinel 1 satellite of ESA. Water locations were calculated for the 5th to 9th of October.