On October 28th, the Alliance’s PA Riparian Forest Buffer Project planted its 1,000th acre! This work started in the spring of 2018 with grant funding from the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) as the Alliance sought to offer flexible, comprehensive reforestation support that would help fill gaps in existing programs. 14 planting seasons later, the project is still going strong thanks to many more grants from DCNR, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), the US Forest Service, and others.

Join us as we reflect on the last six years of upstream work for clean water and healthy forests.

Some of Our Favorite Memories

Establishing a forest is rarely easy, but is always worth it. Forests, especially those near streams, are critical for water quality, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and a myriad other environmental benefits. Six years of planting and tending to young forests has been a wild ride and a meaningful experience for Alliance staff.

Site Success

One of the best feelings in the endeavor of reforestation is “graduating” the site to fully established, meaning it won’t require any more care in order to succeed. With good maintenance and fastidious tending, most sites take four to five years to reach this state. Returning to these sites always makes for a good day; it is amazing to see how large trees can become, how much wildlife can be thriving, and how much cleaner the water can be after just a few years of converting the riparian zone to forest.

One of my favorite sites to take people to is Paradise Community Park, which was planted in November 2018. An early snowstorm of several inches made the volunteer planting unforgettable and the site has flourished despite its slushy origins.

Paradise Community Park, from November 2018 (left) to February 2024 (right)

 

Riparian Rangers

Necessity is the mother of all invention, as the saying goes. By the end of our first year of planting buffers, we realized that we were going to have a hard time keeping up with their tending. Simultaneously, we were beginning to build a corps of volunteers who expressed increasing interest in helping out beyond the plantings. In the spring of 2019 we launched Riparian Rangers, a volunteer buffer tending project. We now have over 150 active Rangers and are supporting “Branches” (Riparian Ranger groups led by partner organizations) across central Pennsylvania. Our Riparian Rangers have become an incredibly valuable resource as we continue to plant more and more sites each year!

Brian Koser, who has been a Riparian Ranger since the very beginning of the program in 2019, poses at his site in Manheim, PA. He has been tending these trees since spring 2019, and in 2024 “graduated” to a different site because they were becoming so mature that there wasn’t too much work for him left to do!

A person standing in a wooded area

Brian Koser, Riparian Ranger

 

Community Participation Via Volunteer Plantings

Volunteers have been an important part of the Pennsylvania Riparian Forest Buffer Project since the very beginning. Our aim is to build a movement for riparian reforestation as resilient as the forests we are planting, so giving the communities we’re planting in opportunities to participate is key. As the number of tree plantings per year has grown, so has our volunteer community; we have been delighted and honored to get to know hundreds of individuals who regularly join us to plant trees each spring and fall. The work to organize these volunteer opportunities has already paid off; we have many sites which came to us through the personal networks of residents who originally got involved with the Alliance as tree planting volunteers.

a group of people plant trees

A family plants trees at a farm in East Earl, PA in October 2024. I’ll never tire of seeing families at tree plantings.

 

The 24-Hour Volunteer Tree Planting Relay (Treelay)

I’m rich with wonderful memories of volunteer tree plantings, that I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. One of the wilder days of tree planting I’ve ever had was our first Treelay (short for 24-Hour Volunteer Tree Planting Relay), when I planted trees for around 18 hours of a 24-hour period. I’ll never forget planting as the sun went down, and beginning to work by headlamp for the first time. We had hundreds of volunteers come out to join us in those 24 hours, and our team had a blast pulling off this manic ode to volunteer tree plantings. We had another Treelay in spring of 2024 and will continue the tradition in spring of 2025 with a new format: a little less consecutive hours of volunteer workdays over a much larger geography.

Three people posing for a picture in a field

In the last few minutes before the first Treelay kicked off, I paused to fuel up with some Taco Bell and pose with Forests Projects Coordinator and fellow Baja Blast enthusiast Rob Frank, and Nikki Lee, former Forests Projects Intern who was then in the first year of her position as Watershed Forestry Specialist with the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

 

Growing Trees for a Growing Program

I leave every tree planting impressed and humbled by the dedication of our volunteers, but am always in awe of a few in particular who have put in an extraordinary amount of time and effort to collectively grow thousands of seedlings for us to use in plantings. This first started with Wendy Smith in 2019, and has since grown to encompass several others – special shout-outs to Jay Brenneman and Rick Cooper for putting up huge numbers and impressive quality along with Wendy!

We’ve started to have so much success with these trees, which are a huge help to support our ballooning number of acres to plant, that we have recently begun to pilot the Pennsylvania Seedling Cooperative with the help of a 2024 NFWF grant. This partnership will help our conservation community to harness the interest in volunteer seedling growing to benefit the greater riparian reforestation movement, and to provide this endeavor as a new way for communities to participate.

As I look back on six years of planting and the 1,000 acres we’ve changed for the better, what really stands out to me is the community of partners and volunteers who have been key in getting this critical work done. We couldn’t do this without each and every one of them, and we wouldn’t want to!

Learn More About Our Tree Planting Efforts