These plantations were planted on eroded and erodible land as the old forests had been used generations ago for building purposes and the land diverted to unproductive farm practices by settlers.

Yes and no. What you are seeing in this video is afforestation in the commercial context. They are planting a future forestry product, the red pine, in a monoculture fashion for easy harvest down the line. As the initial forest product is removed then a more natural polyculture will begin to spring up. If this is a bad thing or not will depend on your viewpoint. This style of afforestation might lead to more sites being forested as there is a commercial incentive to do so, however if you were reforesting without the commercial motive you could skip the red pine monoculture and just go straight to a more natural polyculture design with succession in mind. Skipping the monoculture step would have your land in a more natural polyculture state a lot sooner than this commercially focused approach. If you need the financial resources of the commercial version go for it! It is better to have it underway than not reforest due to resource issues. If you have a smaller scale area where the commercial approach isn't viable, or you just don't need/want the resources offered by the commercial approach go ahead and plant a diversity of species and you'll get to a natural forest decades ahead of the commercial approach.

yup 😸

Agreed. What was depicted in the video obviously works but in terms of the urgent needs of carbon sequestration + maintaining/increasing biodiversity of flora & fauna, I think the 50-70 time scale is far, far, too long & too slow. Perhaps they could have started with the red pine as the pioneer species & once those were established after ~3-5 years, they could have returned to inter-plant with a range of suitable mixed species deemed appropriate to the local area. The evergreen red pine acting as a soil stabiliser & the deciduous species, soil builders via their dropped leaves.

@@pinkelephants1421 I wish we could have more people like you and I on these teams so we could make faster progress.

@@shannagarroutte7829 Very kind of you to say so. 😀

It’s a great idea !!! BUT ,,,,, instead of spending millions or billions on planting trees could we put that towards our debt and balancing the budget ???????? once that is done ,,,,,, we could put money into the environment for planting trees ,,, we could put double the amount!!!!!!!! This another smoke screen,,,, an illusion of creating jobs... The jobs aren’t permanent after you set everything up what happens to the infrastructure then??? My concerns ,,, Like most Canadians are , we are worried about finding another job and then after we find that job how much are the taxes are going to go up because of the debt you and your party has put us in ,, I don’t understand ,,,,

Yes and no... A red pine monoculture on water logged clay will start dying off before trees reach their potential this is great for creating natural woodland but not for lumber. If you put a few red pines in they will do much better as they can create microenvironments for themselves easier in this setting. We plant Scots pine to reclaim land in the UK and they often die off earlier but this creates a great wildlife habitat and helps hardwood establishment.

@@FreeSpeechXtremist I'm in Canada and did plant scots pines 40 years ago. Thought I'd sell a few Christmas trees. Couldn't do it because my property really needed trees more than I needed money. But yes they are dying off. I wish I'd planted more spruce or better pine species in place of the scots. White grow well and have nice soft needles.