Vancouver and Charlottetown may be located on opposite sides of Canada, but both cities share a common challenge: restoring natural spaces that have been devastated by storms.
Charlottetown’s urban forest is still reeling from post-tropical storm Fiona in 2022, which uprooted mature trees across the city.
“‘Apocalyptic’ is the best descriptor I can think of,” recalled Simon Wilmot, Environment and Sustainability Program Coordinator for the City of Charlottetown.
“I've never seen anything like it. We lost trees that are over a century old. We lost a significant percentage of our overall tree canopy, and so we have an enormous job ahead of us to try and rebuild that canopy over the course of the next 10 years.”
That’s why Wilmot is grateful for the help Charlottetown receives from TD as part of its annual TD Tree Days campaign. The campaign is supported by TD Friends of the Environment Foundation (TD FEF), and through the TD Ready Commitment, the Bank's global corporate citizenship platform.
“Since 2010, TD Tree Days planting events across our North American footprint have given volunteers — a mix of TD colleagues and volunteers from the public — a chance to roll up their sleeves and get their fingernails dirty to help enhance their local green spaces. But more than that, these events also help give communities resources to plant trees and shrubs that help bolster local biodiversity and help increase resilience to climate change.” said Carolyn Scotchmer, Executive Director, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation (TD FEF). “Through TD Tree Days events, we aim to help improve the health of local communities through the planting of trees and shrubs."
Restoring the Lost Lagoon of Vancouver's Stanley Park
Roughly 4,000 kilometres to the west of Charlottetown, a violent windstorm ripped through Vancouver's famous Stanley Park in 2006, levelling 41 hectares of forest within the park. The storm heavily damaged two of the park’s last stands of old-growth trees, while taking down some 10,000 trees overall. In many places, invasive species swept in to take their place.
Still, 18 years later, the effort to reverse the damage is ongoing, according to Andy Ferguson, Stewardship Coordinator for the non-profit Stanley Park Ecological Society (SPES).
As the organization responsible for conservation at Stanley Park, SPES is collaborating with TD Tree Days to continue restoration in the Lost Lagoon area of the park. As Ferguson explains, the lagoon was cut off from Vancouver Harbour around a century ago to create a pond, where swans once famously attracted visitors.
Today, Lost Lagoon faces ecological challenges relating to trees, from a lack of species diversity, to invasive species, to extreme weather.
“Some of the conifers have been stressed from these summer heat waves,” Ferguson said, including the devastating 2021 heat dome. Droughts have weakened trees as well. And extreme weather is only predicted to become worse and more frequent as climate change takes hold, making it all the more important to help build up the area’s ecological resilience by re-establishing forested areas.
To work toward bringing the area back into ecological balance, SPES staff will provide volunteers at this year’s Oct. 19 TD Tree Days event with saplings from around 20 different native species to plant, from trees like Bigleaf Maple and Douglas Fir, that Ferguson hopes will one day tower over the site, to smaller native herbs and shrubs.
“We're going in there with a bunch of trees and shrubs to fill in the gaps, so the Himalayan blackberry doesn't have all this open space to come back in,” Ferguson explained.
“A big goal is to work towards restoring the function of this ecosystem, and then address the question of biodiversity. At Lost Lagoon, because of historical mismanagement … the ecosystem doesn't regenerate very well, so it needs extra help which I believe this planting can provide to get the ecosystem started.”
Thanks to this TD Tree Days event, SPES will be supported with resources for a one-day planting surge, including dozens of volunteers, trees and shrubs, and planting materials, including gardening gloves and mulch.
“Having that outside support to help us along the processes of restoration is pretty key,” Ferguson said.
“The fact that TD Tree Days events recur annually rather than only once is a big part of why some of our restoration sites are successful and more so than I've seen in other places.”
A decade-long job to rebuild Charlottetown's urban forest canopy
As in Vancouver, the TD Tree Days event planned for Charlottetown this fall (on Oct. 5) concerns a park — and just like in Vancouver, the event will be continuing work from previous years’ events.
“We're actually building on the work we did last year at a TD Tree Days event here,” says Wilmot, who helps look after the City of Charlottetown’s “urban forest.”
“The urban forest consists of all of the street trees, park trees, and natural areas that make up the canopy in Charlottetown,” Wilmot explained. “Charlottetown’s urban forest was devastated in 2022 by post-tropical storm Fiona. We have an enormous job ahead of us to try and rebuild that canopy over the course of the next 10 years.”
The TD Tree Days event for Charlottetown will take place at Windsor Park, as it did last year, in an area devastated by Fiona. It’s a small piece of the puzzle as Charlottetown attempts to plant 84,000 trees by 2034 to reverse the damage. The figure is high because each tree that falls needs to be replaced by anywhere from 7 to 10 new trees — as Wilmot explained, an old tree is much larger than a young one.
“If you lose a 100-year-old tree, you might need multiple 10-year-old trees in order to compensate for the canopy loss from that single mature tree,” he said. “So, we have to plant tens of thousands of trees in order to compensate for the losses that we had because of Fiona.”
As on the West Coast, climate change will most likely ramp up the difficulty of maintaining a healthy urban forest in Charlottetown in the years ahead. Atlantic Canadians are already familiar with fierce storms that originate in the tropics during hurricane season, and the meterological forecast is that there will only be more storms like Fiona in the future. Trees can play a protective, mitigating role during storms, Wilmot said. For one thing, they can help prevent flooding by providing a buffer that slows down the absorption of rainwater into local bodies of water.
As in Vancouver, the involvement from communities taking part in this TD Tree Days event will most likely mean that Charlottetown will have enough supplies, trees and shrubs, and volunteers for an energetic one-day planting event. The support from TD through TD Tree Days events helps make it possible for Charlottetown to aim to meet its ambitious conservation goals, Wilmot said.
“Every tree that we plant contributes positively to our restoration effort.”
Putting down roots for the future
For anyone thinking about volunteering for a TD Tree Days planting event, there’s a searchable list here of events across North America this Fall.
Not an experienced tree planter? No problem.
“We assume that people are coming to us with little experience and therefore we will show them how to do it,” Wilmot said. “We always give a short presentation on how to plant a tree.”
Over in Vancouver, Ferguson acknowledges that the West Coast is expecting a cold autumn. But the result could be worth a few hours of chilly fingers. Volunteers tell him that watching an area fill up with growing trees they helped plant is a rewarding experience.
“Volunteers … will come up to me and say how cool it looks now and how different it is, and they're really proud of the work they did. It's always nice to hear that.”
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