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Biodiversity Day

Saturday 22 May is Biodiversity Day ! At arboRise we love diversified forests.

But why is this important? It’s quite simple: life is only possible because it is diverse.

On the one hand, there are the basic interactions: every life form is food or shelter for another living being.

On the other hand, there are all the complementary associations that reinforce each other. An example: the Three Sisters culture of the American Indians. By planting maize, beans and squash together, the Three Sisters method increases the yield of each crop, while improving the soil:

  • The tall maize stalks provide a structure for the bean vines to climb on;
  • the beans fertilise the maize and squash by fixing nitrogen in the soil;
  • and the squash shades out weeds among the crops with its broad leaves.

Each plant benefits from the services of the other two. In economics this is called “economies of scope“, when making two different products is cheaper than making them separately. There are many examples of how “economies of scope” can be used, especially in agriculture. Planting walnut trees alongside a barley field increases the productivity of the field because the roots of the trees bring water up from the subsoil and the branches protect the soil from erosion. And the nuts produce oil and the walnut wood is prized for carpentry. This is agroforestry, one of the solutions for the ecological transition of our agriculture.

Unfortunately, most of the time, our society prefers “economies of scale” which consist in ditributing fixed costs over as many units of the same product as possible. Unfortunately, this standardisation creates fragile monocultures, which then require pesticides or herbicides.

Focusing on biodiversity and economies of scope is the principle adopted by arboRise: instead of seeking economies of scale by focusing on one or two species, raised in nurseries, and planting monocultures, we prefer to maximise the diversity of tree species to favour eco-system services and thus obtain the lowest reforestation costs.

Supporting arboRise means planting a diversified forest and therefore also doing something for biodiversity, one of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals 

forêt diversifiée