Mid-term in Yucatán: One million trees planted!

Milestone on our way to planting 2.5 million trees in Mexico during this year’s rainy season.

Since the beginning of September, our planting team in Yucatán has been setting new daily benchmarks. 20,000 trees planted per day was a new rekord achieved already on September 23. By October 15, already 30,000 trees have been planted per day. Last weekend, the team could announce a total of 1 million trees already beeing planted in the current season. And this despite several small breaks due to the pandemic and, in particular, the lack of rain and the resulting drought at the beginning of September. See the video at the end of the article for more.

Teamwork is the key – and the knowledge of first things first

To achieve such top performances, several teams are always at work simultaneously, working in different spots on the planting site. Doing so has advantages: We preserve social distancing (” Corona” is still an issue even on the planting sites) and the smaller teams keep hand-in-hand play smooth. In order to ensure a constant level of control, the work is divided into several steps: Delivery of the seedlings, allocation to the respective planting plots and finally digging the planting holes and planting the trees. Some of them are additionally marked as ” sample trees ” and recorded in a database. They show to our donors which species have been planted in the different plots and will also serve as reference trees for our ecologists in the years to come, allowing them to measure the success of their planting strategy. Or even identify in retrospect where things may not have harmonized at the best.

Close up – This is how you can follow the planting progress

If you’d like to check out the planting progress for yourself, take a look here. By clicking on the link you find the diagram shown to the left with the daily planting figures, as well as – at the top of the page – the daily updated figures for the total number of trees planted.

You would like to get a little bit more detailed, perhaps? Then take a look on our platform here, where you can follow how we’re progressing nearly in real time. Because every day after planting, the teams record their day’s work with geodata and the “sample trees” already mentioned, which are always photographed and measured directly after planting. Simply using their mobile phones.

In the map you can zoom in on the individual daily works and take a look at each individual sample tree. In the sidebar you will also find the total number of trees planted per day per plot and further information about the species. Of course, for each team separately. Therefore, the screenshot shows, for example, several partial areas for “9 days ago”.

The planting team really enjoys the fact that they can now literally “compete” with each other. The tool that enables this monitoring is, after all, still quite new. The described tracking of the planting is done with a new app that we have developed to make our work in the field as transparent as possible. “TreeMapper.app” is the name of the smart tool that, thanks to geodata capture on satellite imagery, allows you to check in from time to time in the future to see how the trees have fared from 2021 to then.

In the video we recorded in September, Antonio, coordinator of the restoration on “Las Américas 7”, tells us how he experienced the first months of the planting season. After all, climate crisis does not stop at Yucatán and, with an unexpected dry period in the early beginnings of the rainy season, has caused the team to postpone starting the planting turbo to a later. Given the current conditions, the second million of trees in this planting season will be just fine!