 Hello everyone. I hope that this video finds you well. My name is Ashley Brown from the Ecosystem Restoration Camps Foundation and this is the March 2021 update video which is basically me telling you what has happened over the last month from when you received the last newsletter. So we've been chatting to some new camp applicants which is always really interesting and exciting. We've been talking to four so far. One is a local community group in the California Santa Cruz Santa Barbara region and they have been very much affected by wildfires. In fact, the people who have applied to become a camp, their own house burnt down and now they're really motivated to start an Ecosystem Restoration Community Centre to welcome people and train them in restoration methods and techniques, grow trees in a tree nursery and feed people who come through and then they will be taken to other pieces of land in the area to work on both restoring land that's been burned and also mitigating future fire risk. The next camp partner we've been talking to is based in South Africa in the western part of the country and they are an eco village that have been working to restore the degraded and desertified land around them for the last few decades and now they want to bring in new people that can bring in new energy and continue to work on this process. They have a learning centre that is available to use and relationships with tribes in the area who are very interested to start learning about how to regenerate their land. We have another applicant from a camp in the Philippines and they want to work on agroforestry, tropical agroforestry and forestry or natural reforestation on a Filipino island and another applicant that we've been talking to is based in the Netherlands and they want to restore farmland across the country and have been working with many, as a consortium of community groups and local governments. So those are just four examples of some of the new camp partners that we're speaking to and we're in the process of going through the onboarding now so you should see them on the website soon. Myself and Misha from GreenPop, Camp GreenPop in South Africa, we organised a training for camps and the general public on how to create an ecosystem restoration music festival which went really well and we're really hoping that the people who came, some camp managers, some of the general public are going to start working towards creating their own music festivals when the time is right. The recording for that is on our YouTube channel if anyone's interested. We are also talking to three Italian agroecology students from the university in Italy who are going to camp Habiba to collect data using our new impact framework and they're going to be leaving in a few weeks so best of luck to them. They will be looking at the land that Habiba has already restored and what it's like in terms of carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water holding capacity, erosion, evaporation, etc. And comparing that to land that hasn't yet been restored but they're planning to in the future. So yeah, about our new monitoring and evaluation framework, we have updated it and improved it since the last iteration and it will be ready for public view in April. We're planning on taking a sample of camps around 12 and doing a large global citizen science project where we bring people into camps, train them on how to do the data collection and then they train the people in the camp already that work there. We will be doing a crowd funder for raising money for these materials such as penetometers, thermometers, data loggers and then other smaller things that the camps need and then once they have those materials they'll be able to collect data year on year and be able to build up a really impressive data set that researchers and professors can use around the world to give a global picture of what's happening in all of the camps. Which brings me on to the topic of if you're interested in going to a camp as a data collector or a research officer, we are now looking for people who would love an adventure that has a real purpose. So if you're interested in these roles you can find the job description also in this newsletter but also on our website so check that out and email me if you're interested. Plans are underway for the creation of a regenerative agro forestry course at Camp Quantor Lines in Guatemala at the end of May so if you want to learn about how to create an agro forest for all of the elements including community buy-in, designing the agro forestry system, implementing the agro forestry here and then creating value-added products, monitoring the valuation, all of it in an amazing tropical setting on the Caribbean coastline. Waterfalls, jungles, you name it. This is the opportunity for you and the information will be on our website in the coming weeks. Camp Artiplano has been donated hundreds of trees from our partner Gone West and these are native plant communities so two types of Mediterranean oak, juniper and then different Mediterranean native Spanish herbs and they are being planted in the natural areas around the camp to continue increasing the photosynthetic capacity and biomass of and biodiversity of those areas. So thank you Gone West. Camps that are looking for campers, if you want to go to a camp right now and get stuck in, Alcora in Australia is looking for specifically Australian campers, Habiba in Egypt and Vercilane in France, all three of those camps are looking for people now so check out our website. If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage you can see where it says camp opportunities and you can find more information about how to go and get stuck in right now. The new camps that joined the movement at the end of last year are being added to our website. We've added a new camp called the Birdhouse which is the first urban restoration camp in the world and they are restoring parcels of degraded land in Hollywood underneath the Hollywood sign and they have a really beautiful video on the website page of our website all about their work so if you're in Los Angeles and you want to get involved or you're going to be going by or you want to go there check out Camp Birdhouse. Our knowledge hub is on the brink of launching and this is a chance for camps to learn techniques, all of the things that they want to learn to be surveyed then we found out what it is that they need and they're looking for it will also be a chance for the platform to enable interaction between camps for them to share knowledge, learning successes, failures as well as clean information from out there from our expert advisory council and the team that's working on that project and it will be soon open to the public too so keep an eye out for that one. And finally we're in conversation with the Soil Sciences Department of Wageningen University to create a channel where their students can search for internships and those internships can be coupled with various research projects that will be happening at the camps and that's really exciting collaboration that we're really looking forward to. If you know of any other universities that you think would be interested in such partnership then please let us know. So yeah that's a quick run through of what's been happening in the camps movement from mid-feb to mid-march and I hope you have a beautiful day if you like what we do and you want to see it happen more you're not yet a supporter you can join as a supporter as a one-off donation or a regular donation and yeah people like you our supporters are the ones that make all of this work possible. So if you care about the restoration of the earth and you are able to contribute even just a little bit that would make the world of difference. I hope you have beautiful days and see you next time.