NEWS

Update 40: Monitoring the planted areas in Lurë

Lurë monitoring

Upon arriving in Lurë late Saturday morning, the monitoring team (seven volunteers, Pavel and Flori) headed up the mountain to the planted areas. After a quick and tasty picnic lunch, the volunteers were briefed on monitoring technique and divided into teams of three to begin their work.

We were equipped with tally counters, clipboards with monitoring points listed, and extra pens (we’ve learned the hard way that you always lose a pen or two in the forest!). We also learned some basic GIS mapping skills, and used it to orient ourselves between monitoring points. The groups then began surveying the number of saplings from previous planting years that were dead and alive, and Pavel used this time to replace any wooden stakes that had been removed or lost from the monitoring points.

On Sunday morning we visited the tree nursery to check on how the saplings were doing, checking the automatic irrigation system and got to see firsthand how waste is minimized by using reusable planting containers.

Some of the volunteers even took a pine sapling home to plant in their own gardens! While the rest of the trees are slowly toughening and will be ready for planting, starting from this October.

We then departed from the nursery and went back up the mountains to finish monitoring the planted areas. The volunteers once again split into small teams, and after a few hours all the monitoring points were surveyed.

While still in the field, Flori showed us how micro-climate sensors work and what kind of data it collects (temperature and soil moisture). This data will be used in conjunction with survival rate to get a more complete idea of how our saplings are faring and how these variables affected survival.

After our weekend of hard work, the data our volunteers collected was put into GIS and mapped so that we can visualize survival rates across different parts of the mountain and across the two years. This data came from a whopping 27 monitoring points and 16.38 hectares.

The areas LURE/2023/A, LURE/2024/A and LURE/2024/B are the plots that were monitored during the monitoring weekend. 2023A had a survival of 68,5%, 2024A had a survival of 64,3%, and 2024B had a survival of 59,2%. Average survival across all three plots was 63,9%.

We want to thank the girls who volunteered to do the monitoring with us. It was fun to have such a cheerful group to work with us. Thank you Edvisa, Bernis, Mergit, Lusinda, Era, Natasha, and me.

What’s next?

We will be returning to Lure to finish monitoring the 2025 area and begin the tree planting season for 2026! We are also currently working on a new space in Tirana, to have as a base, which we are very excited to share more about in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!