Sunny skies and above seasonal temperatures for mid October made conditions ideal for people to get together and do their bit for the environment on Saturday. About 40 volunteers, including members of Pelham Advocates for Trees and Habitat (PATH) and individuals from as far as Burlington who responded for a call for assistance via social media, turned out to help plant 300 trees on two sites within the Lathrop Nature Preserve.
The tree planting was a part of continuing restoration work at the preserve being carried out by the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), which owns the property. Several tree species were selected for the planting, include basswood, sugar maple, and red oak among others.
Berms created for a long-gone railway line created ponds on the property, which over time become warmer and in turn have affected the temperature of a cold-water stream on the preserve.
“It’s heating up a bunch of degrees, and it's causing problems downstream,” said Helen Toner, an environmental biologist with the NCC, “Because it's one of the only cold-water streams left now in the Niagara area, and it is causing problems with those species that are exclusive to cold water ecosystems.”
Thus the stream was subsequently redirected around the ponds to bring temps down, “which also is great, because we think it's going to heat up a little more with global warming,” Toner added.
But during this work 22 trees were lost on the property, so the idea of Saturday’s planting was to replace them and then some.
PATH president Mike Jones said it was “a natural” for the group to take part in the planting.
“Trees are known to be the easiest way to combat climate change number one,” he said. “(PATH) has always promoted increasing the tree canopy in Pelham.”
While there was some initial opposition to the work at the ponds, PATH and the NCC eventually came together.
“(PATH) agreed with the NCC to allow them to build it on the condition of planting trees in to replace the trees that they weren't going to be cutting down,” Jones said.
Toner agreed.
“They were very concerned about the impact on the trees of this project, so they wanted to make sure that that they were involved with any sort of tree planting that they got to do,” she said.
The ponds, meanwhile, will be maintained, Toner said, as they have become home “to lots of nice things, like turtles.”
Pelham Regional Councillor Diana Huson took part in the planting.
“It's always a good thing to have a community event like this and get people to help out in preserving the natural environment,” she said.
Huson’s day job is marketing and communications coodination for the Vineland Research Centre, which has conducted research on soil health and well as optimal species and soil composition for urban forestry.
In her estimation, the NCC has done well to select different varieties of trees for planting at the preserve.
“Native species are always good for the area. They take better to the soil conditions,” she said. “And it's good to also diversify your tree canopy, because different species of trees have different lifespans.”
