CATIE plants 400 trees on World Environment Day

• This activity is highly symbolic as it takes place on the date on which CATIE was created by law

June 5, 2023. CATIE ( Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) staff planted 400 trees this morning to commemorate World Environment Day as part of the institution's 50th anniversary.

The work was carried out inside the commercial farm, in the riparian corridor of the Grande Creek, with the objective of protecting its water supply. The trees planted are varieties of native species such as pilón, chancho blanco, coral oak, uruca, guaba, pitangas, tucuicos and yellow vanillo.

Muhammad Ibrahim, Director General of CATIE mentioned that this day was very symbolic for planting trees. "Today we commemorate the world environment day in the framework of the 50th anniversary and today itself June 5 is also when in 1973 the law founding CATIE was created, so there is a lot of meaning. In addition, we are part of a global plan for the restoration of degraded systems, so the reforestation of this riparian forest is very important for connectivity, biodiversity conservation and water protection," said Ibrahim.

The director also emphasized that this type of forest is also protecting the bees that have a pollination role, for example in coffee, and improve the productivity of other surrounding crops.

Luis Diego Jiménez, head of the Forest Seed Bank, who was in charge of the activity, commented that the planting is part of a process that has been underway for 20 years at CATIE. "This year begins precisely the organization of all the strategies and all the forest called "Sustainable Forest Management with a Focus on Landscape".management projects, plantations and agro-forestry systems within CATIE with an initiative that we have What we are doing is to organize the major initiatives in order to have a focus on where and how to establish forests within the farm. So we started in September of last year with the conceptualization of this project, the implementation began in February and we are already culminating this first phase," he said.

Today there were 400 trees, but in total 6000 trees have been planted in this project, impacting about 20 hectares in CATIE, from silvo-pastoral systems, forest restoration, pure plantations and this riparian corridor that is 7 km long.

Leslie Morrison Vila, from the Latin American Model Forest Network, in agreement with CATIE, has worked on this project to establish restoration demonstration areas with the financial support of the Government of Canada.

"The objective of the tree planting is to establish demonstration areas of restoration within CATIE, which is an organization that is characterized by talking about conservation, ecology, but inside there, are no areas where you can bring people and show them. So we wanted to establish these areas and in the future they will allow us to bring people in, so that teachers and students can use them and learn about different restoration processes and strategies," said Morrison.