We've decided to spend €40,000 to dig a ditch and flood this forest right here.
But why, you might ask?
Mossy Earth, you plant trees and kelp forests and you help wildlife
why are you spending all this money to flood a forest?
Do we really need our forests to be underwater?
This is a fair question, which I intend to answer in full in this video,
but before we get to the flooding parts to properly tell this story,
we need to go back to the start.
And I need to tell you about a very important ecosystem.
Wetlands. Well, to be fair.
Wetlands aren't just one ecosystem, really.
Technically speaking, there are about 31 types of natural wetlands,
but they can be broadly broken down into two categories.
Marine and coastal wetlands, such as marshes, mangroves,
rocky shores or lagoons.
Or inland wetlands such as rivers and streams,
deltas, swamps, and floodplain forests.
Wetlands can be found anywhere water interacts with land.
The special conditions in these areas led many species to evolve and adapt
to live in this environment, such as dragonflies, beavers, turtles and herons.
This means that wetlands are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet.
And in addition to that,
they also play a crucial role when it comes to climate change.
They help fight floods by absorbing the excess water
and also droughts by then releasing that water.
Slowly so that it lasts during the dry season.
They also suck up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.
And when I say a lot, I mean a lot.
This is because in forest ecosystems, most of the carbon is stored in trees.
And when they die,
they decompose and release a lot of the stored carbon back into the atmosphere
with a smaller percentage being stored in the ground.
In wetlands however, the opposite happens after a tree or plant dies,
the water often prevents them from decomposing at the surface,
allowing the ecosystem as a whole to store a larger portion of this carbon
in the soil.
Unfortunately, these precious habitats have been destroyed for centuries,
often drained for farming and tree planting
or by having their watercourses blocked by a dam upstream.
This means there are a lot of areas that used to be wetlands but are currently dry.
So I think now you can see where I am going with all this atmosphere.
We are always
looking for the best bang for your buck when it comes to bringing back wilderness.
The Holy Grail of
this is a relatively small intervention that can kickstart a flood of change
and bring back healthy, functioning and sustainable ecosystems
that can be left alone to be wild and not require any more human management.
So with this in mind,
we've been on the lookout for wetland project opportunities for a while,
and in Europe there is no better place to look than the Danube.
This mighty river runs from the Black Forest to the Black Sea.
It flows for more than 2850
kilometers and supports wetland ecosystems across ten countries.
A notable area is the Danube Delta in the Black Sea,
with its maze of streams, its pelicans and its wild horses.
Funnily enough, I was wild camping in this delta while finishing
and launching the website for Mossy Earth in 2017 Good Times.
Other important areas along the river's course include the last remaining
floodplain forests in places such as Slovakia.
And this is when in 2020 we found BROZ.
This fantastic organization
has been working in the Danube to restore and protect floodplain forests.
After a lot of calls and work between our biologists,
we started working together right in the middle of the pandemic.
Fast forward a few years and we have done three projects together,
such as protecting turtle nests, supporting ground squirrel habitat,
as well as planting more than 60,000 trees in the region.
However, with Mossy Earth growing in size, we recently reached out to them
with the idea of doing something bold something bigger.
It was time to create a wetland,
and this is when together we decided we were going to flood a forest.
The area we are focusing on is here near the town of Ňárad.
It became dry in the eighties due to the construction of the Gabčíkovo
dam upstream.
In addition to this, the remaining water channels were covered by foresters
to create suitable conditions for timber production.
So we are dealing with a forest that is too dense
and has some of the wrong species.
that out compete wetland endemics such as carex species,
because the environment is much drier than it should be.
The plan is to dig 650 meters of ditches from here to here and flood
these areas in yellow and help kick-start the wetland restoration process.
Our aim is to restore approximately 64 hectares of wetland,
which is about 120 football fields in size.
These areas will support a variety of wetland species, including plants
such as Phragmites species, carex species and phyta species, and also wildlife
such as the pannonian root vole as well as a variety of insects
and amphibians, which will in turn support many species of birds that prey on them.
In addition to the habitat creation, this project will also help capture carbon
based on these two studies.
We estimate that when the wetland is fully up and running,
it will capture somewhere between 200 and 355
tons of carbon each year when converted to carbon dioxide.
This means that every year it will suck about 1290 tonnes of CO2
out of the atmosphere.
That is the equivalent of you taking 3902 flights between Lisbon and London,
or the full annual footprint of about 189 average Europeans each year.
This means that over the course of the next 50 years we could capture
about 64,500 tonnes of CO2.
All for a one off intervention of €40,000.
Our focus atmosphere remains on rewilding the landscape
as the problem we face is a lot bigger than carbon.
But it is good to know that this will be great to fight climate change as well.
We will be presenting and discussing this project
at our next Zoom Town Hall meeting for Mossy Earth members.
So if you're a member, keep an eye out for the invite.
If you are not then all I can say is you're missing out
with a Mossy Earth membership.
You'll be planting trees, supporting
wildlife and funding projects such as this one on a monthly basis.
Check out the link in the description to learn more
as the work begins over the next few months.
Myself and Hannah will hop on a train and make our way to Slovakia
to show you a bit better what is happening on the ground
and how the project is progressing.
We hope you are as excited about this project as we are.
Until next time. Cheers.