 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, even for some people, good night. Welcome to this symposium organized under the auspices of the ecosystem restoration camps movement. If you've not yet heard of this movement, make sure to go to our website to learn more about this mighty movement of organizations around the world, now 53, working to restore degraded ecosystems and introducing regenerative practices within them. My name is Peter van der Gaag, I am here as facilitator, moderator of this symposium. I am the director of the foundation setup to support the ecosystem restoration camps movement, and I'm very pleased to welcome you all to this symposium, but on a very important subject on our agenda. The question of using non-native species in ecosystem restoration. And I'm going to introduce that issue to you first, and after that we will hear our speakers who will bring their perspective to the table. There's plenty of room to ask your questions, you can do so in the YouTube chat, and we will be able to see those questions and then answer them throughout the event. So please feel free to use the chat to maybe introduce yourselves right now to each other, but also to ask your questions to the speakers. As I said, the symposium focuses on an important debate in the world of ecosystem restoration, the introduction of exotics in that work. There are many pathways to restored ecosystems. There are also many opinions on when an ecosystem can truly be considered to be restored. Some argue we must start by picking a place in time where the ecosystem is considered to be native, mapping which species were there at that time, and then hence are considered to be native, and then restoring that natural area back to that original state as it's considered to be. Others argue that ecosystem restoration basically just means the return of ecological function within an area where that has been lost or severely degraded. The Society for Ecological Restoration, which is basically the standard-setting body on this question, basically puts all those activities on the continuum of ecosystem restoration, bringing back life to places where life seems to be disappearing or has disappeared. Importance of ecosystem restoration is to have a plan, and this is where the use of native and non-native species come in. What are you going to do in the process towards a restored ecosystem or rehabilitated ecosystem? In that plan, you may consider the use of non-native species, any type of tree, plant, animal in that plan. And there are a few risks associated with them, but there might also be, and there are actually also benefits. Let me first define native, invasive, and non-native to you, because I think they're important to keep in mind when we're going through this discussion. Native species are species that originated and developed in its surrounding habitat, and they have adapted to living in that particular environment. Invasive species is a species of plant or animal that outcompetes other species, causing damage to an ecosystem. Non-native species are a species that originated somewhere other than its current location, has been introduced to the area where it now lives, but is not necessarily invasive, so it's not damaging the ecosystem. Now, non-native species can cause the loss of biological diversity, and biological diversity is at the genetic level, at the species level, but also at the ecosystem level. Imagine the whole planet being covered by one particular type of forest. That's not diversity, even though that forest could be really healthy. The genetic diversity could differ. Non-native species could threaten that. They could even threaten the well-being of humans when they become invasive. In a previous job, I had the privilege to visit Stacia, an island in the Caribbean, where beautiful pink flowering plants was basically covering the entire islands, and nature conservationists were at a loss to try to combat this thing, because it was really pushing away many of the unique native species of that particular island. But non-native species can also provide conservation, and they actually can be quite useful in restoration. Beneficial could be that they provide habitat or food resources to rare species or humans. They can serve as a substitute for extinct species, because we are facing quite a large extinction rate. Or they provide desirable ecosystem functions in a degraded area that haven't been there before, that have been lost. The speculation is that non-native species might contribute to achieving conservation goals in the future, because they may also be more likely than native species to be able to persist and provide ecosystem services in areas where climate and land use have changed rapidly, and because they may actually evolve into new and endemic species. And I know in many desertified regions where native species simply can no longer exist, you have to go to non-native species that are more suitable for arid regions to get started on that restoration process. They may actually help speed up the restoration itself, or help making it more effective. A non-native species can provide all kinds of ecological or even economic payoffs. Risk is always an issue when new species are introduced in an ecosystem, but greater risk taking could be warranted where environmental conditions have been severely modified through our interventions as humans, or where just simply having ecological function back is the sole goal of the restoration work. But non-natives have a bad rap. That's why we're having this discussion right now. We know the stories, I just told the story of the plant, we know the stories of rabbits in Australia. They're actually demonized in many conservation circles, get rid of any non-native that's there. But I think, and I think that's also what we're going to be discussing in this seminar, this blanket condemnation of alien species restoration efforts is actually counterproductive. When their presence doesn't threaten the ecosystem, I think they could be tolerated, and I think we're going to discover that, or even use the good advantage. Many foods that we consider staple crops today are at one time invasives, have been at one time invasives. They have been introduced into that environment. So in this seminar we're going to hear about examples. We're going to cover that debate because they're still pros and cons, and I hope it's going to be very informative, and maybe even entertaining, because we have a great line up of speakers. I shall introduce them when it's their turn in full because there's a lot of great stuff to be said about them. And remember to ask your questions in the chat. And we're going to start today with a pioneer in the Netherlands, Walter van Ek. He used to teach at the Nijmegen University here in the Netherlands before becoming head of campaign on food and agriculture of the friends of the earth, the Netherlands, for the Dutchies amongst us, amongst us, milieu defense. Building bridges between policy and countryside, that was his job. He decided in 2009 to become a farmer himself. Together with Peter Janssen he started Food Forest Kettlebroek, which is created on a bare field of two and a half hectares near where he now lives. Walter is chairperson of the Stichting Voetselbospouw Nederland Foundation for Food Forestry in the Netherlands, which concentrates on the conversion of conventional farmlands to food forests. And this foundation is currently involved with the transformation of about 200 hectares of industrial agricultural fields to food forests. Walter, the screen, the microphone, it's all yours. Thank you Peter for the kind introduction and you're almost set enough. So we don't have to say that much anymore being in the lineup, but we give it a try to add some thinking about this interesting topic. So in overview I will tell you a bit about our project. This is an aerial picture, but first a bit about the definition of a food forest. And well it's a design system for production of food, so it's agriculture. And we must be aware that of the terrestrial surface of our planet the biggest part is occupied by agriculture. So if there's something to improve for the better with agriculture, we can make big steps forward. This type of agriculture, however, is dominated by a polyculture of perennial woody species, so trees and shrubs. This is a huge difference from what we nowadays know the industrial agriculture with having big fields with monoculture cropping systems. And a food forest also mimics how a natural forest is functioning. So some ecological principles like building soil fertility, but also pollination and play control is within this concept of agriculture, a type of agroforestry, but a rather complex type of agroforestry. And so if it's done well, designed well, and has the right combination of species, it's not needing any external input. So not longer a huge amount of fossil fuels being needed for your agricultural methods, no fertilizers, no pesticides needed, which is also a restoration from our current ways of farming. So back to ground zero. This is where we started in 2009. This is a bare field. And this is there. You might notice this is very little biodiversity left in the landscape. Hardly any animal can live here. Some bacteria will be in the soil, but no funki even, no place for the birds to nest. Actually the agricultural landscape in the Netherlands did cause a decrease of insects amongst the volume from 70 to 80%. So that many insects have gone, and therefore we finally reached what Rachel Carson already coined at the beginning of the 60s, silent spring. Many, many birds have left our landscape. There's nothing to eat, no place to nest anymore. A few years later from above, this is our food forest in the mid, and the surrounding fields are monoculture ryegrass grass to be used as fodder for a little bit too many cows we have in our country. But as you can see, the food forest system is a design system creating micro areas with their own micro climates and species combinations. Probably we exaggerated a bit with introducing and planting over 400 different plant species. Also even more varieties of course. We have 40 varieties of apples, but they're all malice domestica, so this is one species. And Nature added a few hundred more. Those are of course mostly indigenous in our area, the native ones, but we planted a lot, a lot, a lot of non-native species because we are farmers and we have to produce food and we want to create a restored landscape with a classical functions of carbon sequestration, good water management, and species richness, so return of biodiversity combined. In the back, two of the bare fields to the south is a nature reserve with some forested area still. Actually this has been a nature reserve already since the 30s of the previous century, so almost 100 years, and it's taken care of by the state nature agency. And research has been done on the species richness of nobsile butterflies, nesting birds, and ground beetles in the two areas. And this is a standardized research, the same methods, the same period, the same amount of time, the same researchers to see what differences there are in species richness of nesting birds and the amount of them nobsile butterflies and ground beetles. And the amazing finding was at that time already that we have reached the same levels roughly in species richness and even more individuals, so the amount of insects and birds found within this research. This was actually much higher than we expected when we started our project, our food forest. So this was a very good outcome, which was very welcome since we were in debate with many friends, being ecologists and criticizing us for planting non-natives. And then, well, when we are in the pub, I call them botanical racists because they tend to be against every non-native species. They claim that we are hurting nature by planting non-native species. That's what I learned at school and I repeat it. But actually the birds and the butterflies and the ground beetles don't discriminate. They like those non-native species quite a lot and even it's helping them to find enough pollen, enough nectar through the year. That's my opinion and that's what we see happening in our food forest. To clarify why we plant that much non-native species, this is a glance of some harvest of our food forest. It's probably around 34 different species, all edible for us. It's in the Netherlands and northwestern part of Europe and out of this whole area, all of them be depicted here, only two of them are native. In the middle you see the stinging nettle. It's a leafy vegetable with a lot of nutrients in it and in the left there's the hazelnut. All other crops out of our food forest are non-native and this says a lot about agricultural needs non-native species to produce food in our own landscape. This is partly due to the glaciers heading to the south during ice ages and then pushing the vegetation down south. South of Europe there's the Mediterranean area with the sea so a lot of those species were trapped and got extinct. It's a natural process but it was a wave of extinction during those ice ages on our relatively tiny continent. Therefore the Germans do now eat Kartoffel Salad. These are tubers from Peru from South America and the Italians put tomatoes on their pizza but that's from Mexico. Those are agricultural crops being introduced to Europe because there are not that much edible species in our own continent anymore. Even our daily bread is from Asia, from Syria, Iraq, surroundings where agriculture got a big boost some 10,000 years ago, but were introduced to Europe. The Russian scientist Fafilov came up with a theory saying where the hotspots of biodiversity were actually was neglecting perennial species and trees a lot. But also this says something about the European agricultural being dominated by annual cropping systems which as you might know each year starts from ground zero and is causing a lot of the organic matter going up in the air and demanding fertilization all again and again and it's therefore very risky to create desert-like conditions. Well another desert-like condition was what I call the first climate crisis summer in our area because in the summer it's our growing season. Those meadows around our food forest should be green with a turn dry and there was no harvest anymore. The food forest did stand the heat and drought quite well and three other green fields to be seen and mentioned them briefly. One is a green field with corn from Mexico that can stand the heat a bit better which was not producing well but that is a monoculture crop from with one exotic species. Another field is potatoes in monoculture cropping also from Abarot as I already said this was heavily irrigated so therefore it stayed green and the third green option is in the north close to our tiny village it's still from the local soccer club and it's from plastic so we have now different options to have our landscape green you can restore it with the food forest system being a polyculture with natives and non-natives together to produce food to have a function in your landscape but also to be a safe haven for lost biodiversity to return you can have monoculture cropping systems with exotic species with all the filmable aspects fossil fuel use polluting and plastic is an option. The IPCC is having a strong opinion on this we really should change even our diet to help fight climate crisis. The Lancet Commission on actually this is very nice type meta study meta study of how to combine a healthy diet for humans with the planetary boundaries boundaries how to take care that the ecological crisis is not taking over and well the good outcome is it's possible because a healthy diet is mostly plant-based and very diverse would it be eating a lot of meat it's not true then we would have be in very big problems with creating a healthy diet with the diverse plant-based menu it's the best one we can do so we have to scale up and our food forest on the tiny two and a half hectare is maybe a bit too romantic our foundation is now involved with over 200 hectare landscape restoration so from our empty agricultural fields to tree-rich polycultures but partly organized in a more rational way so taking you can see here a sketch of a 20 hectare project and then you see we use native species to create hedge rows and lines of trees in the landscape which play a useful role and within those hedges we plant a polyculture being have offering a good harvest and this is in rows for ease and scaling up of production this is a cross section for the future of such a planted food forest in lines and you can see the diversity and the vegetation layers above each other when it is growing a bit older and here are the clans of some of the harvest in boxes with healthy apples originating from Kazakhstan with sweet chestnuts hybrids from Asian chestnuts from from China and Japan and the Mediterranean chestnuts with kakis from eastern Asia with Japanese walnuts all growing in this case food forest caterbrook all part of a healthy diet for the humans and also sequestering carbon because if you eat from what a tree has been producing you do not longer cause greenhouse gases emitted you help them getting stored because growing trees store carbon in the own biomass and in organic matter in soil so that's the shift from annual to perennial cropping systems and from fodder to food production which is very much needed as you all might know to end this introduction a very interesting research done in Canada where indigenous communities already before the 19th century diversified the planting in their own surroundings to have a richer diet and the population got wiped out with cattle related diseases and the area is still there so within the native forest there has been a created forest because the forest lives long and has its own succession with those species producing nuts fruits and berries healthy diet but it's not only useful for the humans with a set of over there again it's still much more wildlife insects birds mammals living in those areas than in the original more dull and forest being less diverse so this is mirroring what kind of restoration we do we want there is no area without anthropocytic surroundings at the moment our influences go everywhere climate crisis is everywhere but if we take in mind that we must not think about individual plants and blame them for being non-native we must think in plant communities in diversity of plants together and the functions they have together for insects and for agricultural purpose as well this was my last slide I think we should head on to the next speaker because yeah I'm curious to know her story as well Thank you Walter before we go to Judith there there is at least one question from the audience on YouTube right now and I have one also and then then we'll let you go we'll go to Judith there's another question that just came in the chat there's one question directly on your statement that it's a closed circle in the food forest Siska asks on YouTube surely there must be some inputs whatever nutrients you take out must come back somehow or it's not sustainable almost by definition question mark yeah that is misunderstanding and this is because this is a perennial system functioning like a natural forest we do have one external input this is the sun and we do have many green leaves those are our solar panels that produce carbon hydrants fixed energy and this is delivered to soil food web and the soil food web gains nutrients out of unorganic material and this is from the Netherlands they can can go as deep as New Zealand there is a lot of nutrients below us and so a forest is building up fertility this is totally different from you maybe hopefully organic allotment garden growing annual vegetables you have to fertilize with compost or whatever with growing perennial plants you are not needed for the system trees don't need us we need trees okay thanks I'd like to in the next minute further expand on what you ended with because I remember in the conversation we both had you said all over the world in so-called native forest you see these patches of where once human life was full of exotics you have more examples yeah it's well known about for instance amazon and yucatan in in americas that archaeologists nowadays know that where there is a higher amount of edible species in that forest there must have been a human settlement before so when the europeans came to conquer and and destroy civil change over there they did think those forests were virgin like forests which are the original state of of that continent but it was already influenced by humans but partly for the better but europeans tend to see trees being timber because they have that little trees in this continent there are no indigenous nut trees in northern america there are 20 with peak and hickory and black walnut and white walnut and others so for the indigenous americans it was just common sense to use that forest for your food production as well for the europeans the forest was good for timber and that's all uh and so they did not recognize uh the the food forest in the other continents okay one more question from the audience and then we go to june uh because it's an interesting one how much time does it take you to work the land yeah and how much does it produce in tons at uh the very good questions uh the first one is um i i created a nickname for myself and uh that's the lazy farmer since we let nature do the job but remember if humans stop doing many things they they they do within agricultural nowadays with tilling and plowing and spraying and having way way way too much cattle uh they actually fight return of the forest if they stop doing this most surface of the planet would become a forest again but we use this movement of ecological succession towards forest like system since they are the most productive and have the most fidelity in their system this is the way nature wants to organize herself on every square meter we use to process to plant an edible forest and then we should learn to sit on our hands and to stay away uh for for do almost nothing for for at least five years come back and discover edible paradise is growing uh with a lot of animals living there as well uh and now we even have snakes so it is really true that the total of the paradise is getting closer with victory also being there all can be repeated uh and and brought back and now uh and this is a warning the first five six seven years there is very little harvest since trees and shrubs have to establish and have to grow and a nut tree or sweet chestnut in our temperate climate it takes 15 years before production starts to be a reasonable amount but then it will go on for 100 or 450 years more and increase so it's almost like the figures we now get uh recognized from a pandemic slow starting and then exponential exponential growth that's what we are now have now so i'm not the lazy farmer anymore we have a lot of work to do being harvesting which is fun to do and therefore uh i don't know the exactly tons we made calculations for the more rational designed food for us that you did see in the sketch uh and then it came out even if you have a certain mixture of species uh we can feed uh eight people with the production on yearly base from one hectare which is more much more than this agricultural is doing nowadays which is also the shift from further production to food production which contributes to this uh being more successful in feeding people eight people per hectare yeah okay great okay we will we will hear listen to you more in the panel uh let's go to our next speaker i shall introduce you jude for more than a decade jude journalists jude the schwarz has been on the trail of nature inspired solutions to global challenges she focuses on what is missing from significant conversations for example her 2013 book cows saved the planet helped call attention to the role of soil in biodiversity and resilience to floods droughts and climate change more recently she's been um she's seen the failure of policy discussions to include the pivotal role of healthy ecosystems in climate regulation inspired by the work of john d you we know it well and the advent of efforts like ecosystem restoration camps she published the reindeer chronicles and other inspiring stories of working with nature to heal the earth which she describes as a global tour of earth repair jude lives in vermont on the mountain side uh where she's working herself to enhance biodiversity particularly native plants and pollinators and she is a frequent uh presenter on these topics including providing testimony to the u.s congress welcome all the way from vermont jude to this global symposium thank you so much peter and just i'm smiling to think that when i wrote about ecosystem restoration camps and a few years ago the book came out two years ago there were two camps and now you say there are 53 so i would say that is rather rather extraordinary so i have a very different perspective compared to water um then again i have a very different context so that makes sense so let me dive in do this uh awkward screen sharing and there we are that wasn't so bad okay i will assume that everyone can see this unless i hear otherwise so i would like to inter oopsie why it aha i was clicking the wrong thing i would like to introduce you to a critter i met down in the meadow below our house look at that bright almost neon pink color and what looks like kind of fuzzy white mad scientist hair this is an evening primrose moth actually there's two of them and here is a photo of the moth on its host plant that is drumroll an easy and an evening primrose flower now that pink color might seem an odd fashion statement for an insect trying to stay under the radar but when the evening primrose flower fades it does turn pink and then it's hard to see but on that moth there's the tiniest bit of yellow on the edge of the wing so that it blends in with the petals a friend of mine a few miles away sent me this hey look at this photo and this is a rosy maple moth which i would say does a pretty good job of imitating the evening primrose moth i share these moth encounters to highlight the specific interdependencies common among plants and pollinators and there are similar relationships with birds and animals and plants that may require particular species for nesting or feeding or camouflage the evening primrose moth needs an evening primrose plant full stop fortunately for the moths the plant is widespread in the eastern united states and thrives in many environments including disturbed landscapes but not all native plants are so robust or plentiful the rosy maple moth does well with a variety of trees common in the eastern us landscape it is therefore a generalist not dependent on a single species so these moths are doing fine but i can't help but wonder how many pollinators are out there flying around looking for host plants that are few and far between and what plants and insects will be lost as a result this dynamic is central to the discussion of non-native species which as we know are often displacing native species every plant or pollinator is not just an entity to itself but a member of an ecological community remove one piece of it and the system struggles or collapses quietly and invisibly and with repercussions that may take long to be noticed and so here in new england as in places around the world crucial species like specialist pollinators are at risk so as peter said i've been writing about ecological restoration and since i had we live on some land on the mountain side of a in southwestern vermont decided well hey let's try to do what we can't what we can hear to restore the landscape to improve and enhance the land where we live so i took a permaculture design course and when tony and i applied a permaculture lens to our property we decided that our highest priority is supporting biodiversity now tony who knows a lot about nature and has written and photographed a lot of insects and other species he observed that when we moved here 22 years ago he saw several varieties of bumblebee and now he will only see one or two mostly the common eastern bumblebee here is a bumblebee speaking of bumblebees that is paying a visit to a red clover which by the way is the vermont state flower and so through my permaculture design course i learned of this fellow named evan abramson who had taken the same course a few years before and he was extremely motivated by the plight of native pollinators here is evan he started a company called landscape interactions to design landscapes to support at-risk native pollinators so he came here and he came we we set it up so you know figured if we create plantings for native pollinators well maybe we can create an island but how much better to create a corridor so another land owner and the bennington museum which is just a few miles from me joined in and so we are creating areas that will support these pollinators and the hope is that we will inspire other people in in town to do something to join the party and put in plantings of their own and already we've seen a great deal of interest so i must say that okay but here we are this is this is at the george aiken wildflower trail at the bennington museum there's actually a whole lot of land there and a big meadow in in in the back and there are lots and lots of possibilities and in the wildflower trail they already do have a lot of native plants so that's a really good start but yeah so the visit to our land i must say was an exercise in humility despite all the flowers around us it turned out that we had very little to provide for native pollinators we had a lot of the activity earlier when the native blackberries were blooming but here at the end of june we were basically a food desert evan said that red clover which we have in abundance provides a temporary nectar source for many at rich at risk species not ideal but better than starving but we could certainly do better and you know just as important to realize that this scenario this food desert for pollinators is playing out around the globe due to a combination of many factors pesticides herbicides loss of habitat due to agriculture and other development and in residential and commercial landscapes the use of non-native species in landscaping so the people who lived in our house before us were very very proud of all the pretty shrubs and flowers that they had but when i looked at it more closely now that i understand how ecosystems function and the importance of native plants i saw that very few were native i was shocked to realize you know as i got plant lists and started to look around before evan's visit to see what plants we could get i was shocked to realize how few native species are available even at a nearby organic nursery that i love typically my happy place during spring and summer apparently many plants that seem native you know they have the the right name are actually hybridized you know to get a prettier color so that they can offer a range of colors and don't provide the same sustenance another unnerving realization was that honey bees are not native to north america i mean of course i know that but many people keep honey bees and believe that they are doing an ecological service and i you know you see honey bees like buzzing around plants and that just looks so beautiful and you know the ecosystem is alive and literally buzzing but what i learned is that one hive can displace thousands of native bees pollinators that have a mutualistic relationship with plants integral to local ecology like for us a plant like purple flowering raspberry and here it is this this is a photo that my husband took at the beddington museum and it's really beautiful this is a plant that we had a lot of when we moved here we have much less now i did find a patch yesterday but what i realize is that the the grape which may or may not be be native the grape has really overgrown that so i need to do some management to bring that back the question is what do we do when we want to restore landscapes are native non-natives by definition bad how might we shift our landscapes toward native species in order to support native pollinators and in supporting the pollinators supporting the birds and in supporting the birds which bring they return the seeds to the to the soil and so we get a building native ecosystem it is important to note that the context for many non-natives becoming entrenched in a landscape is the result of colonization and extraction imposed on indigenous communities environmental study scholar katriona sandalins refers to this as botanical colonialism so it's interesting i noted woters talking about botanical racism i mean so you know there is this duality you know there's that this you know you're not good enough if you're non-native you know speaking to a plant or you know this plant came here due to colonization and we need to keep aware of that because it hasn't been it hasn't evolved in this landscape and therefore isn't necessarily supporting those mutualistic relationships of plants animals birds and insects and also it's important to recognize there went back and still forwards that many efforts to get rid of non-native species are counterproductive as permaculturist tau aryan points out the use of chemicals bulldozing and clear cutting to attack unwanted plants including non-natives amounts to a multi-billion dollar war on invasives wreaking ecological havoc and fattening corporate coffers rather than fighting invasives she says we need to look at the conditions to lead to their prevalence in the first place for this is ultimately what needs to be addressed perhaps the non-natives are filling an ecological niche maybe they are all that can survive certain change ecosystems rather than automatically viewing a non-native as the enemy to be vanquished ask what ecological functions it provides you can then if appropriate if your your assessment warrants this bring in a diversity of native plants to do those particular jobs a helpful stance is to manage for rather than against to create the conditions for the ecological community you want rather than to focus on unwanted species and expect that its removal will make everything dandy it's hard to be purists when most of us are dealing with damaged landscapes for us here in vermont managing for threatened pollinators means putting in native shrubs and clearing sections by pickaxe and by hand and then putting down native seed mixes if it weren't so arduous to transport animals we could borrow a few sheep and let them graze down targeted spots we've had sheep here before and it's awfully nice speaking of animals I am now going to pivot and describe a situation that may seem to contradict my words but again let's keep a focus on function here are cattle and donkeys at katana station in the kimberley in australia a site the size of singapore it's actually quite extraordinary some of these cattle stations in australia so donkeys are not native donkeys were brought to the australian outback as pack animals in the 19th century then when motorized transport came in the donkeys which were no longer needed were set free they stuck around they formed bands and they thrived and wrote you know roamed around the landscape now governments such as the western australia government where katana and that's the province where katana is deemed them pests and have declared that they should be eradicated now trust me you don't know you don't want to know how this is done donkeys showed up at katana and the hanglers who managed this land realized that they could be part of their fire brigade because one of the things that they managed for at katana is minify minimizing wildfire intensity and frequency that's really you know one of the most important things that they do because you know as it as it is said of the kimberley there's always a fire somewhere so they realized that the donkeys could play a role by by managing the vegetation that would otherwise become fuel by eating it by building moisture and fertility in the soil and that they could be managed by helicopter i mean that's how they do things there scientists such as biologist arian wallach found that non-native animals like donkeys can provide ecological functions that have been unfulfilled in australia since the loss of the megafauna in the late pleistocene that would be 40 to 50 000 years ago she calls them invisible megafauna because the way that they impact the landscape is not always seen the presence is not always seen except as you know um you know pests that should not be there among other things wallach and colleagues found that donkeys dig wells that provide water for vulnerable small marsupials in the landscape i will end with picture of a native owl this is the barred owl on our property does this mean that we should haul in animals from near and far to places like australia of course not but we can examine non-native species role in the landscape and learn from that as many of you know i write a lot about animal land dynamics when we seek to restore landscapes let's not forget the role of animals in forging ecosystems and their importance in the cycling of nutrients water energy and information in order to do justice to our landscapes let's understand how they work thanks so much for listening thank you very much Judith for that insightful presentation the european honeybee that's that's the cattle amongst bees it's the honey we like and i know one of our camps in france virselay uh originally had the plan to use hives of honeybees to pollinate their plants when they learned that that's a monoculture honeybees and that there is a thousand species of wild bees in in only in france already it could do the same job but they're being pressed away with with these honeybees except you don't have honey um the uh i i get the feeling myself that there there's of course the need to conserve species and to prevent invasives from in the end making species extinct i think that vauter said is there is also the need to have very productive systems so that we can have more space for maybe even for for for nature that mimics that natural process but that isn't really a natural process it uses a lot of nature or it is a natural process but it isn't that native ecosystem the native species that we're trying to protect also there's a few questions from those watching the the live stream um the first one uh is actually for all presenters so i'm thinking maybe we should leave it for the panel but i'll question it right now i'll ask it right now and then we can we can think about it but the question from a candida shin is uh with current climatic conditions and shifting habitat characteristics what is native are we holding on too dearly to what we think was naturally present in an ecosystem that's a question mark maybe that's something we can we can just can discuss in the panel's uh discussion i can make i can one comment about one comment please is that when you're planning and doing decision making that is a factor that you can take into consideration so for example on our walk through through the beddington museum's wildfire wildfire wildflower path evan pointed out a couple of species that this is very good to have around because it does like warmer climate a warmer climate as well so we are building that into the future so you know so thinking ahead um having a lens that that anticipates future climate conditions can be helpful so it's not necessarily hanging on to old conditions it's where are we now and where are we likely to be okay another question from a great name regenerationism uh judith aren't a lot of non-natives taking advantage of degraded soils thus aren't such invasives indicator species of certain excesses or deficiencies absolutely absolutely what species choose to come in and whether or not they are thriving their relative condition can give us a huge amount of information because there are some well we could say weeds or other species that that kind of get comfortable in a place that can indicate compacted soil for example or a higher than typical ph or you know a lack of a particular nutrient and so those species are coming in to try to help the soil for us and absolutely we can learn from those species from what they are trying to tell us and final question and i may this may be one for the audience my doorbell just rang and there's no one home planet healers asks what are the guidelines for using non-native species obviously doing the work to find uh locally appropriate native species is needed first before you look into non-native species i think that's the rest of that question i don't have an answer to that question that is why we are here great you just put a big burden on the symposium let's see if with the next two speakers we get closer to such an answer uh thank you judith for this presentation stick around for the panel discussion with the youtube audience um our next speaker is uh mariana amoris duta which we call we call her yanny she is a permaculture designer architect master planner planner and founder of the regenerative's regenesis project uh which is an ecosystem restoration camp in the philippines and it has a mission of healing nature through people and healing people through nature um yanny worked for many years developing national frameworks standards and industry-wide training for the built environment in singapore and she's now using her experience and skill sets for her true passion regenerating nature and communities through the regenesis project she aims to trailblaze the transformation of various industries in the philippines towards regenerative pathways through small positive actions that create systemic change yanny please open your microphone and share what you would like to share thank you so much for the introduction peter and i really enjoyed the past the previous two presentations because i actually agree and resonate with both of their perspectives so i'm going to share a little bit more about our experience um okay so yeah so my name is yanny duta i'm the founder of the regenerative's project so as peter said we are an ecosystem restoration camp in the philippines and since june of last year we have been organizing ecosystem restoration camping experiences every month and in those camping experience we always you know try to embody our mission which is healing nature through people healing people through nature so together with local and foreign tourists there's always a restoration activity and also there's also like a healing activity for all participants but what we also want to do is we want to go beyond the typical notions of ecosystem restoration and use the same activity as an opportunity to transform human systems so our perspective is if it's human systems that brought about this degradation then we should use the same systems to bring about its regeneration so that's why we have different arms or different sectors we look at agriculture tourism enterprise industry design and development because i'm an architect and then of course education so our approach or our regenerative framework looks kind of like this so we identify and restore degraded land and bring ecosystems back to life but we do it hopefully through creating and identifying and then creating appropriate regenerative enterprises so whatever regenerative business models works best for that site we want to use that to fuel the regeneration process and involving local communities local stakeholders basically to introduce human stewardship but the most important part of our framework is when we do this we want to see increasing health and resilience of living systems over time so living systems means not just ecosystems but also human socioeconomic aspect and you will notice that the ultimate goal is health and resilience over time we never set a goal that you know we want to restore ecosystems to what it was before because we also don't know what it was before what was the specific composition we just want to see this overall upward trend so how do we measure health and resilience um so i'll get i'll get to that later but first of all i'm going to share a bit about our site so we are located in an island in the Philippines the Philippines is an archipelago so we're located in Bohol island and our site looks like this it's actually really representative of a lot of our upland areas i would say that Philippines being within like the humid tropical biome this was most likely tropical forest cover we don't know when it was deforested but right now it looks like this it's just degraded grasslands and it's colonized by one or two pioneer species which are indicator species of poor soil fertility high pH and every year it goes through this unending cycle of summer fires the farmers burn the farmers actually burns the mountains to regenerate this grass species because this grass species serve as fodder for their cattle um and then after the dry season the rainy seasons come in and then wash away nutrients towards the lower uh lower watershed and then it just goes on to this never-ending cycle which means that it will never have a chance to ecologically evolve without some form of human intervention another point that we'd like to make is that Philippines is i think pretty much everyone knows by now that we receive the brunt of climate you know climate effects typhoons are a norm in our country and we have just been impacted by one of the worst typhoons in history six months ago but everything is back to normal now so when we talk about health and resilience it's resilience against natural calamities also in our case one thing that we really want to highlight is that um i think in the ecosystem restoration camps website it states that all camps are living labs but in our case we're really really serious about this it's so important that our site is a living laboratory in every sense of the word because of our mission because of our specific goals and also because of where we are at in our journey so that means to say that it's more meaningful for us more more impactful for us to have a smaller site 17 hectares wherein we pack as many appropriate restoration strategies as we can into that site as opposed to having hundreds of hectares in multiple sites doing only one form of restoration strategy and this is because we want to maximize learning learning includes failures but the point is we want to understand what works best within our context so that that we could propagate so in order to do this at the onset we actually sat down and identified what metrics we want to track so these metrics have to do with water soil slash carbon and then biodiversity a lot of these metrics we actually got from erc's m and e framework which have been really really helpful but a lot of these are also our own unique metrics because of the specific context of our site and because we have a mini water shed within our site so that's why we have a lot of metrics related to water so when it comes to our site and it when it when it comes to restoration earlier I mentioned that we want to pack in as many restoration strategies maybe I could just classify it into so we have like natural ecological restoration or ecological systems and then also agro ecological systems so food forest bamboo production and all of that and I'm going to go into all three and then basically explain what role natives and non-natives basically play in each of those so starting first with agro ecological systems or food this is very similar to what Walter's project did so we are introducing food forest agro forest and in some areas even upland rice production because Southeast Asia we eat a lot of rice so in permaculture terms this is basically like zones one to four but focusing on food production so our overarching restoration goals in this case is really food sovereignty or self-sufficiency and doing that while increasing soil health and fertility over time which in turn increases land productivity over time so it's the opposite of the extractive processes today so instead of explaining exactly what non-native species we are introducing in these systems in which there are a lot and I think Walter I mean the previous presenters already made a case that you know a lot of our food crops are already non-natives it's already part of our culture and all of that one thing I want to highlight is that it's not necessarily a specific exotic crop or a non-native crop that is causing ecological disturbances it's more of the management practice so monocropping use of synthetic or commercial fertilizers decades ago also slash and burn farming which is the reason why our hills are deforested it's the practice that is destroying and not necessarily the certain kind of crops so moving forward when it comes to our agroecological systems our main goal is to introduce as much diversity as possible but to do it and also to do it in a framework of regenerative agriculture so through food forestry mimicking the natural structure and framework of nature supermoculture, centropic forestry, agroforestry and all of that the framework is already there it's just a matter of like implementing it and then next for agroecology on bamboo so the goal here is that we hope to trail place a regenerative bamboo supply chain that we could then link to sites that have been restored so in the Philippines bamboo is sticking off the bamboo industry is sticking off but we hope to do it in a very regenerative way so there is an ecological aspect to it but there's also a commercial aspect to it so it's also important that we try to increase the diversity and also the options of all the kinds of commercial and ecologically valuable bamboo varieties that we could and their respective products and then when we do that we also have to think of you know a sustainable and resilient supply of raw materials while at the same time trying to support ecosystem restoration so oh my gosh it's so big maybe I'll just show this so as I mentioned bamboo industry is sticking up in the Philippines so there are actually a lot of initiatives where you know there are thousands of hectares that have been allocated or been given thousands of seedlings of giant bamboo let's just say so um these are all of the propagules being given to those projects or those LGUs that are embarking on large-scale bamboo afforestation are where we are a bit cautious with regards to this is even if bamboo does have a lot of proven ecological benefits we don't want to introduce it as a monoculture to produce a single product even if that bamboo is native and in many cases it's not necessarily native or not necessarily endemic another issue and this is I think this issue is unique to bamboo because some species of bamboo has a habit of it's called gregarious flowering so after its long lifespan let's say 100 years some bamboo species they flower and then they die so they flower at the same time and then they die and this especially happens in the same cohort that has been propagated as sexually from the same other plant long story short we want to avoid ecological disasters like that especially if it's planted in a monoculture in a single crop where all of your bamboo will flower at the same time and in India it actually causes famine so that's why they associate bamboo flowering with famine so in order to avoid these kind of ecological risks we do several things first is in as much as possible we try to propagate our bamboo from seed so that we basically restart the genetic clock back to zero the problem with that is that bamboo flowers very rarely so we it's difficult to get seeds in the Philippines itself so that means that we have to search other sources so that also means like non non-native bamboo species the other way that we try to manage it is instead of obviously a monoculture we want to integrate bamboo into more of holistic system integrated as part of agroforestry part of the landscape following the patterns of the landscape and then producing multiple products as opposed to just one single product so that is why all the bamboo species that we have we have chosen it for their specific function so whether it's windbreak for shade specific bamboo that we use for construction materials and even with just the the the the category of construction materials there are all kinds of different sizes that we need some for main columns slump or smaller members so that's why as i mentioned it's important for us to have a good variety of usable materials there are also a lot of like ecological functions as well like for erosion control for groundwater recharge drought tolerance and all of those things so when it comes to the products what we hope to produce as a result of these integrated systems are kind of like bespoke products and stacked industries so that at whatever stage the bamboo is at there is something to harvest then finally the final the the last zone are really more pure natural ecosystems so you will notice that half or more than half of our site is actually dedicated for natural wild reforestation so in permaculture terms this would be like zone 5 because it will be less managed more wild so our specific goals here are health and resilience of restored forests and when we talk about resilience that also means resilience against natural calamities because it's it's just a wild forest so there's less incentive for you to go and fix to fix or replant wild forest that has been destroyed so we want to make sure that we do it right the first time and when we introduce these ecosystems we hope to do it with a goal to increase local biodiversity create habitat for local fauna and in our case as i mentioned we have a mini watershed so we also have ecosystem restoration goals related to watershed restoration so reducing erosion increasing groundwater recharge and so on and so forth so you will notice here that even within this zone of natural restoration we have a few sub zones or like sub like sub plots for our experiment the first zone which is here we will plant native species native native trees native trees in fact we will be planting it this friday we have a group of 200 people they're actually government officials um um yeah government office workers and military task force and they will be providing the native tree seedlings um and then they will be planting it so that's a huge event this friday but i guess our research question is is it enough to just is planting native tree species enough in a sense that it's going to achieve all of these goals that we set out and then it's going to survive like it's it's going to survive on its own or um is it sometimes more nuanced so we actually have a research grant that is ongoing this is being conducted by a local university here and funded by the government so the output of that research grant is to produce a species mapping to suggest the specific species native species that we have to plant on our site based on the specific soil and water characteristics of our site so not only is it native but it's native and suited to our own specific soil and water and specific microclimate so that's kind of like the second research question like okay if uh will it actually help if if the specific native species should be more um you know suited to your specific site context and then the other layer that we're adding here is is it enough to just plant it right away or do we have to do certain pre-work so in our case the pre-work i guess is kind of like a pre-restoration work so to speak um what we're doing is we are actually planting vetiver grass on hedge rose following keyline patterns of cultivation it's a it's a certain geometry along the landscape but this particular grass vetiver grass is not native to the philippines it's indigenous to india if i'm if i'm not mistaken and only been introduced like a few decades ago the reason why we're using vetiver grass is because of the specific properties and functions of this magic grass that we have not seen any other species grass species local species able to surpass specifically its root systems so remember that our problem is erosion our goal is to stop erosion um control sedimentation and um recharge groundwater because if even if we plant native trees it will take a while for a forest to establish itself and we need to address specific problems now so what we want to do is we plant these pioneers first to address the immediate problems first while making the land more conducive for uh the the native species to take take over so eventually once the native species grow it will eventually overshade the vetiver grass and it will just die off basically just leaving its roots because it will already have fulfilled its role as a pioneer species um yeah just just one more minute yeah so final thoughts actually so i guess for final thoughts is not all non-natives are created equal um it's a spectrum and our goal i mean our goal is health and resilience to whatever that looks like so that's why uh it's important in our case to collect to set and collect metrics we use metrics for comparison for benchmarks to see trends and validation so that we don't have to wait 30 years or whenever um our ecosystem will achieve maturity and uh it's also important to do trials and in our case we will only scale the systems that has been tested and has been worked um and then other ways to reduce risk i think others have also mentioned it um really think about the function what is the purpose of the species that we are introducing and then in as much as possible resilience is achieved through diversity and also through proper management and at the end of the day we have to be clear about our goals yeah and that's that's basically it for for my part yeah thanks so much for your attention no thank you for sharing uh this this great plan and uh sharing the thoughts that go behind it and uh your awareness of risks around using non-native species but also your keen interest in using them when they when they speak things up there were a few questions we're running a bit late so i'm going to save those for the panel discussion so there were a few questions for you that we will say for the panel discussion i'd like to go to michelle botan hi michelle good to see you again um i'm going to introduce you uh to the audience michelle michelle's story is one of software developer converts into soil developer uh as we just had jenny's story of architecture and turning into a permaculture designer for 15 years michelle worked for some big dot com we will not name them companies in brazil and co-founded a company to track users navigation and deliver very boring ads to annoy them to buy the stuff they usually do not need trying to find a bit more of a meaningful life to our artificial way of living michelle realized agroforestry was a big disruption in the food system and in 2016 he enrolled in a syntropic farming course to learn and then qualify as a teacher in 2017 michelle acquired land and became its guardian systemic earth restore and seeker of bien vivir which roughly translates to the good life or fullness of life of the communities um michelle uh i know you have uh also a presentation and a great story to tell so i give it fully to you can you see my screen yes we can see it right so uh talking just just a little bit about us the camping spherical we found we founded that the camp in 2017 based on our vision to evolve our society to to live in a more sustainable way so we shall we we can't see the full screen presentation we see the the editing screen for the presentation okay let me check this can you see that now we see we see we see the presentation but we don't see it in full screen mode we see it with all the uh subslides now we see there you go thanks and maybe you can minimize the speaker view yeah all right i'm not very used to that i'm becoming a user now i'm no longer the it guy you know no so here at campus where it's me and gabby so we have been here for five years now it's a land of five hectares and during this time we have uh regenerate about one hectare of this land and we had the support of a lot of people from the community and we had we had the courses here so these are the pictures of some course that we had uh the one on the on the left is the last course that we had with syntuptuous farming and we implemented a syntuptuous farm focusing on medicinal plants and we are located 100 kilometers from san paulo in the paraiba valley on the top of a mountain 180 500 meters meters high so on the right we have uh the uh a map brazil we we with all the biomes that exist here so we have six biomes in brazil so we are in the math atlantic uh which is uh rainforest so uh now it remains just 12 percent of the atlantic atlantic rainforest and in the middle you have the cerrado which is a dry uh forest uh on the top you have catinga which is a semi-arid zone and in the north you have the amazon so uh atlantic rainforest as i said remains less than 12 percent now when compared to the amazon is 25 percent of the size of the amazon and 75 percent of the population of brazil lives here in the coast and is one of the most biodiversity ecosystems in the world you can have almost uh 45 uh 450 angiosperms which means bushes and trees per hectare so uh is a is a umberophilus uh forest so depends on high moisture and climate change is affecting that moisture now so we don't have the moisture that that that that species evolve uh over time so climate change might collapse this environment this ecosystem and there is a discussion that that could become a cerrado in the future and the same is happening with amazon now so destroying the ecosystem uh we have an ecosystem uh that is more adapted to to dryer zones uh to to occupy that land so sumpaul is the biggest city in brazil and is running out of water now and there's not not enough investments in ecosystem restoration so uh our local complex we are although we are uh in the atlantic rainforest we are very close to to some remaining fragments of cerrado so we consider that we are in a transition uh ecological niche from matatlantica to to cerrado and the the local forests have been was destroyed more than 100 years ago due to confrontation and our mountain is north face so we have a lot of winds here and they uh dry the the lands a lot and all the water springs here uh in the this uh this region has has dried even water falls and we are surrounded by eucalyptus monoculture and grazing land so it's a very sensitive microclimate and we consider that this place is a thermometer for what's going to happen in the near future uh and in nearby we we have been talking with people and the water is disappeared everywhere uh in other regions that was very abundant in terms of water and also in the uh regional ecological restoration uh context any geos and academy they are beginning to discuss some hybrid models of restoration which combines not just the regional biome the atlantic rainforest but also cerrado due to the climate change but because if you restart just with uh the the atlantic rainforest the atlantic uh species maybe in the future the future they they won't have resilience for a drier environment so maybe it's a good choice now to have the cerrado species uh so they can help recolonize that in the future so uh our vision here is to become a uh a school so we call regenerative culture school so in the next weeks we might release an internship program and we'll also become a community so this community we call cure uh so we have some remote collaborators so partners to to structure it and we want to become a private reserve because it has a status that is irreversible so uh in the future no one can can destroy the ecosystem here because it's protected by the federal law and we want also to expand the territory and create projects projects to support the indigenous people so talking about indigenous people uh this is an uh indigenous leadership and a philosopher in brazil Eilton Krenak and he says that the crisis we live is the result of the artificial way of living that modern society has created so we created artificial artificial worlds and we are improving that with metaverse and things like that now but let's uh think just a little bit about a concept a simple concept what is life so living systems uh our units of interactions they exist in an ambience so from from a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood and independent independently of the that part of the ambience with which they interact the niche nor can be the niche defined independent independently of the living systems that specify it so that's a concept uh uh of matron and varela which tries to explain what is what what is life what is a living system and that's an important because when we uh see that there is no tree or there is no uh uh the the ecosystem is formed by a network of interactions we see that just one single species can cannot disturb the whole ecosystem because it's much more complex and it's much more resilient than just a single species so just to give you an example of niche ecological niche this is a tree that I pruned wrongly uh with my machete I cut his head uh and then it sprouted again so from the middle to the top uh there is a new head and if you look into uh the the bottle you see a black thing here it's a cut cutter peeler that was leaving uh underneath the peel that that uh that uh the that's real after I pruned it wrongly so in this uh context I created a niche an ecological niche for this uh species to find the proper way uh to to live so living systems are an ecological unit organism niche so we can think of uh the the two things together the living organism and the niche and the niche can be a rock can be a mountain can be a river can be anything so once you uh create a niche that we will be occupied by some species animal or plant so uh no native species if you uh at least some some uh I can see here about uh the the characters of that so they evolved in a niche right as as the native species so the niches that uh they evolved uh consider the nature switch that we are uh used to use here they evolve in an environment with low resources in terms of water nutrients uh low biological activity high thermal amplitude so if you see this characteristic it's very uh uh similar to the characteristics that we are going to see in the graduating environments and the the idea to ecosystem services so provisioning services by regulating erosion control for example primary production of timber nutrient cycling and it has a good in a very efficient propagation strategy so in general they have a lot of seeds and so they uh they grow very fast and when compared to the to to the to trees of the same ecological stage to the native trees of the same ecological stage they grow faster and the management the management of the the non-native native species sometimes easy others create a durable seed mix so it's hard to to to eliminate them to remove them it's not easy so non-native species are a threat but well balanced and balanced and resilient ecosystems uh like the the amazon which was supposed to be a pristine forest a forest that had no human interaction and actually uh we know that that's not true all the the recent research shows that indigenous population managed the amazon rainforest to create the soil and to create the the the the ecosystem as it is now so for this species called pupunya pupunya is a species that's widespread now in amazon is uh is a food source and in general people think that's from amazon but but actually uh it's from central america so the indigenous populations brought that from central america and they by selecting the the best genetics they improve the size of the fruits in 2000 uh 2000 uh percent so uh due to the biodiversity and structural coupling of the organism niche a single species probably won't disturb it at scale okay so uh if you look at the depleted ecosystem probably the non-native species will thrive because the human mind uh in general say that that species is aggressive and dominant is bad but actually that non-native species just occupying an ecological niche uh due to anthropocentric intervention so uh should we combine non-native species uh non-native with natives yes in our case we do that a lot and and we say that we if you we want to see the ecosystem restored in our lifetime because the natural uh regeneration is very slow and depending on the surrounding degradation it can last centuries or maybe we already reached a point of no return to the local environment so just using the native species won't support us to do the restoration in our lifetime so in that case the entropic environment is a result of disturbance as i as i said as i mentioned uh regarding the the the amazon but also uh the the disturbance can be used in a good way so uh uh two main factors i speak i will get back to that later but two main factors of first patient to dominate the local environment lack of biodiversity and lack of human presence to manage to manage the ecosystem so uh just to give you an example of the indigenous tribe called Kaipo for amazon they do the management so uh they do the clearing which is called uh um uh koei vara so they cut the trees they burn it becomes a fertilizer they design a new agro biodiversity food system for them so on the right you have an example it's not it doesn't look like a monoculture it look like a smart cell like a living organism and they manage they introduce they remove the the desired species and once after a few years they abandon that era and let the ecosystem regenerate by itself so what uh uh so uh these people learn how to create disturbance all those environments but that disturbance that's in a good way because they respect the limits of the that environment and once they reach that limit they uh move and let the natural regeneration restore that again so regarding uh so this entropy farming we can say that uh it's a modern way of doing farming in the way that indigenous uh populations did right so what we do is biomemic uh restore the ecosystem the ecosystem a lot analogous to the original ecosystems show you have one more minute and okay let me try to hurry up and so we consider that we are part of the ecosystem right so here I have a picture of uh about 30 days of syntropic farming we have a lot of vegetables here but we have also a lot of trees natives and non-natives and we have an ecosystem two years later right we have the bananas and we have we have the native species and also the non-native so the non-native natives that we use here they uh they can be used for microclimate they produce the NPK for for the environment and also there is the offer in general we can buy those seeds we could use native species but to use native species we need to to harvest that we need to collect the seeds and that's very labor intensive so the native the non-native species that we hear here we use here so one uh one example is eucalyptus it's from Australia and grows very quickly provides shade provides wood wood as fertilizer and we do the pruning of this eucalyptus after two years for example so here I have one species pruning and it's sprout again and then we prune again so we use that strategy to build soil we do the same with glady seedia we do the same with the java clune with from from ninja and that provides also the fruits for the fauna and we can do the same with with nocina but this is a very uh tough speech to deal because it's very uh propagates very intensively and we also use the shrubs so just to give you an example we use tetanodivercifolia resinus comunus grasses also grasses from Africa like planicum asmus so we prune this grass maybe five or six times a year and also the green manure all the green manure they're all nonatives so nonative species uh are one more two when we humans are part of the metabolism of the ecological ecological unit organization and what is considered to be the side effects are product of the anthropocentric changes in the ecological balance ecosystems are on risk not due to the non-native species but to the culture of these humans who live separated from from nature metabolism that's all thank you thanks uh very much michel sorry to rush you along uh it's a fascinating story you've obviously consciously chosen to work with non-native species to speed up the restoration in that badly degraded area and the threat of the serato change from the Atlantic forest to the serato I guess also motivates you further to uh to speed up that that return of the functioning natural system we're going to we're a bit late on our time and I apologize to people who are hoping that we will be done at quarter to eight Amsterdam time I don't know what that means in your own parts of the world but we do still promise a panel discussion um there were some questions from michel there were some questions for for janny uh maybe in the interest of time we can treat those later in maybe in the chat or beyond below the youtube video as a response but maybe amongst the panel some quick reactions from each of the panelists of everything that's been presented judith valter janny who would like to start michel judy judith i i see in your face that you're brooding on something um really i'm just i'm just sitting with feeling humble because these are completely different contexts from what i know and what struck me that's really a common point for everybody is the question what are you managing for so what are your goals and i think all of us have been grappling with a different set of goals and a different set of circumstances and i think that fits on a large on a planet like ours that some are conservation focused on existing species and some are focused on preventing further desertification some are focused on building abundant food systems so you do have that that is true it's that that is true it's the plan first the one thing that struck me that everyone is thinking about the potential threat of non-natives and what that could do for native species any other reactions on the long list of presentations yes if i am allowed to be there and i also noticed all of us are aware of climate crisis already being in our landscapes because we are in our landscapes and this is what policy makers still are lacking a bit it's in in the ivory tower in the offices and in the next meeting of the co p but in in any landscape we must think about how to have this combination because i think we all are in favor of native biodiversity but we also have to produce food we also have to fight erosion we also have to sequester carbon so this is making a mixture and yeah redesigning the landscapes in the cell agricultural has brought us a damaged planet and now we are looking for alternatives but i really found all the other presentations very insightful and very nice to hear and it is helping me to think about these matters how how to combine them and just one thing i was able to check up about the red clover the pheromones national flower it's a non-native is it for pheromones yes so you are very tolerant i'll check with my consultant on that our conversion to that this debate will continue any other reactions either yanni or michel on everything you've heard yeah i think on this topic in general i think it's not black and white you know native is good non-native is bad and that's why i find it really fascinating that i still find this discussion in certain forums even in the philippines people arguing in the comments and sometimes it's good to have a discussion because it means that we're talking about important issues and then there's respective implications i think the important thing is that we really have to understand our own specific context and our own specific goals and based on our specific context and specific goals what are the the the the best steps moving forward whether if it's we're using a different a mix of both or different systems or whatnot as long as we are striving towards it's literally the same thing right we're we're striving for resilience climate resilience restoration of our ecosystems it will look different for everyone but it doesn't mean to say that this is good that is bad so it's a it's an interesting topic thanks thanks yeah maybe michel you were just a last speaker maybe an overarching thought i think the the cute factor it's much more important about than the than picking up the the species for restoration i don't know because uh at this moment the cry as as for an access the cries that we are living that it's a cultural factor because we design the cities uh to be huge and act like uh like uh like a cancer draining resources from uh from from uh much more distant places all the time so maybe we need to design the system the the the cities to uh to be more distributed and participate uh in the creation of the resources that they need in terms of uh biomaterials and also water and all the ecological functions that the the city needs to exist uh i think that the the the use of donate species are not the biggest problem uh in terms of uh destroying the the the ecosystem i think the the cultural factor that designs the cities and design the way that we live is the the thing that we should carry a little bit more you know city dwellers are the dangerous invasives what you're saying michel um thanks there were a few very specific questions um to yanni and michel um i'm not sure if i should ask them because i'm not sure how the whole panel can react to them um well i'll just ask them and maybe maybe everyone has a thought but martha kellerhals asks for yanni are you exploring abba abba do you know what that is yanni abba ka yes fiber native to the philippines and a wonderful fiber for plants for textiles are you exploring it or are you not is it not part of your plan um we've heard about it but we we we don't have a plan to integrate it as of yet but it could be in other sites okay great then a wonderful name again we've got such wonderful names of people i don't know who the person behind music and mushrooms is but that is the name asks mariana are the trees you were planting inoculated with ecm fungi which i guess are fungi that allow trees to help each other stand away to describe it valter i saw you not you know what they are yeah it's a type of mycorrhizal farming funki so cooperation between the funki and the tree yeah we have started yeah we are so it's part of our soil building process um collecting indigenous microorganisms sometimes we just try to capture it under like a healthy bamboo grove and then inoculate like our substrates and all of those things so yeah we we also acknowledge the importance of biodiversity not just in the above ground but also in the low ground because that's where the partnership comes in okay i'm looking for the question for michelle sorry michelle i have to scroll down a whole bunch of things uh michelle quick question then planet healers asks this one another great name what is the typical size of indigenous clearing and timeline to return to forest once the community has left for a bit do you know well that's very specific for the amazon population uh in general it depends on the size of the tribe right in general the tribes are no longer uh not no much much than uh 2000 but in general i see that they have 200 so i think that uh the size that they use in they they have in general is less than a hector to feed that all that population okay now we go back to the whole panel thanks for answering uh planet healers uh and we've had this question before what are the guidelines for using a non-natives are there guidelines should there be guidelines and planet healers uses an example uh so what guidelines can you offer can we offer guidelines for example in canada where planet healer is i use cover crops that die after one year or winter uh and avoid perennials and once and i kill and avoid perennials and once that can self seed and spread would that be something that is advisable i don't think so proliferant seed spreader sorry about uh i think this is too strict uh but that was in my presentation already uh i think it's important to to avoid invasive non-natives uh and this can differ per area or climate zone so be aware what is happening what you are doing uh is if you introduce a plant from elsewhere check it up often there are already introduced for instance in european botanical gardens or estates in the 18th and 19th century many of those species which we can eat from and become part of a food forest system are already there and didn't behave invasive so that's that's a good test if you have such a sense it's an example in your area uh but having said we must not plant invasive non-native species maybe we also should notice that most of us because we live on planet earth uh are living in destroyed landscapes and in destroyed landscape pioneer species are the ones coming first and actually that task is to recover literally from bare soil to soil with loose vegetation and this can be indigenous species the native ones or the non-native ones but the ecologists get crazy if they see a non-native species doing the pioneer role but they should wait 150 years and then there is a forest with uh models are no role left for the pioneer species anymore so this is the the the four dimension the change in time the ecological succession you should be in the planning and thinking also not the whole planet can become a forest right well 80 percent any other reflections on that should there be guidelines Malta says what planet he says is too strict I feel like I'm not sure if we could go into really technical because then there's like an endlessly like plant this don't bless that but there could be like overarching principles and I think what Walter has mentioned is a good one in the first place um if there is data already that there are invasive species in your area that you should avoid we should avoid that and in our area there's this horrible horrible example of a reforestation project in the 1960s and it was done to recharge a watershed or something the problem was that they planted mahogany and only mahogany which is extremely invasive and not only is it invasive it actually alters the biochemistry of the soil and releases toxins into the soil so that no other species can survive except for mahogany so now it's like literally an ecological dead zone it's a forest but it's a desert and it's very difficult to remove so if there's a list and in our country there is a list so check that first don't don't plant that the rest would probably be in the range of adapted adapted like adapted plants and just works fine with others has already developed a relationship and it could be beneficial almost so if you're using within those range then it will boil down to what your specific function is intended function or intended intended ecosystem or intended yeah specific goals yeah because you also have in your your plotter is the intent to restore native forest right you have the agroforestry agroecology part and then there's the native forest section yeah so for that specific goal in which we want to restore native forest which means bringing back habitat for local biodiversity then it makes more sense that we have to work with native species because native species would have already had the pre-existing relationships with those um biodiversity that we want to bring back so it also doesn't make sense if we just introduce like non-natives when there's already natives available so we use whichever is actually appropriate to our specific context or goal okay thanks michelle yeah the main reason that we use non-natives is because when compared to the natives they grow faster so they grow faster so they support even the primary the pioneers to come in a very degrading environment so one of the species that we use here it's very excited the eucalyptus because in the monoculture and eucalyptus cause panic reactions with most ecosystem people yeah even here and I tried to the first site here I do not plant the eucalyptus because I said I don't want to plant the eucalyptus because we are surrounded by eucalyptus and is one of the responsible to to drive all the the region but we realized that the eucalyptus provide the wood to feed the soil faster than any other species native species so after two years we have trunks of 15 centimeters which means money when you need to buy that mean that that that third lighter you just cut the trees and put in the ground you know so it's the problem is not eucalyptus because the eucalyptus underneath the eucalyptus we have a lot of native species and we use that species to build the soil so we we can do that with other species like Lucina which I mentioned but Lucina has a lot of has has tons of seeds so to use that species you cannot just let the tree there and let flourish and produce the seeds you need to be part of the metabolism of that environment you need to be relating with the environment and see them the right moment that you need to go that there and create a disturbance so the disturbance is to prevent that species to to to give the seeds and then use that species that that species also provide the the wood and also is a the goodness and that species the the Lucina is when compared even to this to the natives is the only one that I see that goes into the grazing land and the grazing land now in brazil it's uh is dominated by the baqueara which is a non-native species but the the natives take they take decades to to uh to have a natural succession over a baqueara but Lucina can do that so if you plant Lucina over baqueara you have two native non-native species and you can prune it both to build soil and then remove them and get in with the the native species so I think that there are one more tool and what makes different uh what can make the difference is the human presence in the environment we cannot just plant them and let the the species there because they are very efficient in what they do and they're just doing their jobs okay yeah so basically you do have a vision for more native species at the end but you're using you're using non-natives to speed that process up and because you're there you can manage them prevent them from becoming the uh the new non-native that dominates a particular system and pushes everyone out okay uh it's eight o'clock in my part of the world I know Yanni it's way past midnight so uh thank you for that by the way Yanni I think I'll go end this for humanitarian purposes um and uh I thank all of you um and I'll give you one more chance for one final reflection and then we're going to close this this session so um opening the four for final reflection the ones send off you would like to have everyone remember and then I'll close the session anyone wants to kick off with a final message it could be goodbye um I'll just say that this whole conversation to me shows the power of the grass roots in regenerating our global landscapes because all of us have come to this through our own volition you know maybe we're partnering with governments or companies but the impetus is with us thanks good good final one anyone wants to talk to that no no I don't want to talk that that's fine thank you for organizing uh also the people behind the screen apart from Peter doing a good job as well uh but I liked the conversation the presentations and I think uh the diversity shown here is part what we uh also are longing to see in our landscapes so even if I am in favor of a food forest it's I also like the other types of agricultural what's called landscapes so the mixture is is is the answer uh and together we are really creating an answer to the crisis we we are seeing so good luck to everyone thanks Walter uh anyone else final statements and then I close Michelle uh well I think that we need to to become nature again and to be part of nature metabolism we need uh to be closer to it so we need to consider ourselves ourselves as one more species part of the ecosystem and managing the ecosystem and yet we need to get into the forest as Walter said if we uh there there was no humans in the the planet almost eight percent of the planet would be forests so we need to make peace with forests and we need to learn uh how we can uh benefit from the all the research that the forest provides to us and I think that uh the the indigenous people uh uh the in the Americas they learn how learn how to do that they learn how to live in peace with with with that environment for thousands of years and now at this moment we also should support them because they are uh the protectors of the Amazon and the remaining uh uh complex more complex ecosystems in the world and there is a genocide happening now so let's try to to to get back to the forest and let's try to support those indigenous populations that are under risk now thanks for that call to action I don't want to put the burden on you Yanni knowing it's so late to say something else but if you wish you're you're welcome to I guess I'd just like to thank ERC so much for organizing this really important conversation I think all of us want the same thing and we're on our respective journeys to get there I guess our final thoughts is that um I guess nature is one beautiful complex living system which is more than the sum of its parts it's more than one single organism that being said I hope that our particular species can do more good than harm that is true and uh Yanni your ERC uh we're just a team helping out uh the ERC is that incredible uh movement of now 53 projects like yours Michelle's uh who are who are actually doing the work and and dealing with these issues that we've covered in the symposium about when Judith are involved in advisory capacities so it is becoming an interesting movement and I'm I'm always in awe when I see the presentations of what's going on on the ground I'd like to uh share my screen again this is the slide we opened with this is slide we want to end with if you have been watching this if you watch this on YouTube uh later in the week days that come uh know that you will see uh you have watched this you will have seen great presentations from about of a neck you Judith watch uh Yanni and Michelle from the ecosystem restoration camps movement I hope that inspired you uh as I said too there's a team a small team that tries to support them one of the things that we do is also raise funds for these projects so if you haven't joined yet as a supporter or haven't donated yet to these incredible projects please do so uh follow the link that's on this slide uh I'd like to thank Kath and Melissa from uh the team who have been setting this up and who have been making sure that everything is functional thank you both and I thank you the audience for participating I understand we didn't see it but I understand the chat was lively thank you for bringing in your your views and opinions there and hope to see you in one of our next events thank you all