News and Activities

A major step in the arboRise adventure was taken yesterday evening, 12 December, at the extraordinary general meeting of our association. following the committee’s proposal, the general assembly voted unanimously the dissolution of the association and transform it into an arboRise foundation. Why ? Reforestation is an activity that naturally takes time. Consequently, arboRise is committed to long-term partnerships: In particular with the field families, the agreements extend over a period of 20 years. Following our on-site surveys, we are convinced that only the income from carbon credits will guarantee a fair remuneration for the Guinean families who commit their land to our project. For our donors, only a carbon certification will guarantee them that the reforestation has actually been implemented (real) that the reforestation would not have taken place without the project (additional) that real biomass growth can be measured against a baseline (initial measurement), taking into account uncertainties

As it is extremely time-consuming to visit each of the 650 hectares restored by arboRise to assess the health of the new forests, we sought to measure tree growth remotely. But how to do this? NDVI sentinel 2 is the answer! The European Union’s Sentinel II satellite takes an infrared photograph of the earth’s soil every 5 days with a resolution of 10m (1 pixel: 10m x 10m = 100m2). The data provide many indications about a region, such as humidity/aridity, the presence of fires, and also the nature of the vegetation. An important advantage is that the data is available free of charge (see Sentinel Playground). The value we are interested in is the “NDVI” (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) which corresponds to the rate of vegetation cover on the ground, a good index of the quantity of biomass, therefore an index of the quantity of trees (forests appear clearly

What a pleasure to celebrate with Natascha, Thaís, Tiago and Faisal the presentation of their “When Forests Meet Finance” case study to the Executive MBA (IMD EMBA) management of the ‘Institut for Management Development in Lausanne! All four of them are following this very demanding management course and have become passionate about arboRise’s activities in recent months. Karl Schmedders, Professor of Finance at IMD, was interested in the situation of arboRise, which is fascinating from an economic point of view. How can an NGO active in reforestation be made profitable? What are the stakes in the carbon markets? How to reconcile the interests of investors and those of the Guinean families who make their land available for reforestation? Convinced of the pedagogical potential of this case study, Karl proposed to our four students to make it the subject of their Strategic Consulting Project. This is an in-depth analysis of the

Final results of the field experiment As a reminder (see publications of 15 August and 15 September), our scientific experiment, funded by the Research Challenge of ETH for Development, aimed to measure the impact of seed coating on the germination rate. What were our findings? Out of 40 selected forest species, seeds of 26 species could be harvested. The remaining 14 species could not be identified in time. A first shoot count took place in mid-July. This was followed by a second verification count in mid-August. These counts were made difficult by the abundance of weeds present in the field. This explains certain inconsistencies, indicated in red in the table below: Of the 26 species in the experiment, 17 (65%) had already germinated two months, respectively three months, after sowing. The correlation between the maximum germination rate per species obtained in the experiment and the theoretical germination rate according to

Is planting trees in direct sowing possible in Switzerland? This is what we wanted to find out in the context of the “anything is possible” operation that we initiated in December 2021. Remember: as in Guinea, we were looking for several “field families” interested in making a plot of land available for reforestation, and several “seed families” ready to collect forest seeds to spread them on these plots. After the formation of the groups and numerous exchanges throughout the year, to study the plots of land made available, to take into account the expectations of their owners, and to establish a procedure for the harvesting of seeds, the harvests could start in September. Each “seed family” was responsible for collecting the seeds of the tree species chosen for a specific plot. And we all got together on Saturday 29 October to scatter all the seeds on the Herbolaria field in

ArboRise wins 3rd place at the “Prix Diaspora” of the Fedevaco !   The Diaspora and Development Prize is an initiative of the Federation of Cooperation of the Canton de Vaud, which aims to promote the involvement of the canton’s diasporas in the development of their countries of origin. Through this award, which takes place every two years, Fedevaco aims to increase the impact of diasporas in their home and host countries and to strengthen their position as actors of cooperation and sustainable development. Since our vice-president, Mariame Camara, is originally from Guinea, it seemed relevant to us that arboRise submitted her application, which was accepted by Fedevaco (see the publication of 20 October 2021). We were thus able to follow the seven high-quality training modules and develop our development project in parallel, of which the following is a summary (the document is available on request): In sub-Saharan Africa most urban

Preliminary results of our scientific experiment (see publication of 15 August 2022) Organising the harvest of forest seeds requires knowledge of the fruiting periods of each species. We recommend establishing a harvesting schedule according to the model in the table below, which is the result of our field surveys, combined with online resources  [1]. The ideal harvest periods are shown in green (orange: possible start and end of harvest). They correspond to the ecosystem and climatic conditions in the Linko sub-prefecture. This overview of maturity periods allowed us to form three groups of species, to increase harvesting efficiency. To optimise the germination rate with the method of direct seeding of seedballs, we then analysed four characteristics of our 40 species: seed dormancy and dormancy-breaking pre-treatments [2], seed propagation mode, seed weight and desiccation tolerance. As dormancy can have an impact on the germination rate, we identified the type of dormancy  [3] of