Training Support for 8 Village School Nurseries at Doi Mae Salong

FORRU-CMU contributed to a project organized by Thailand's Supreme Command and the IUCN to restore forest on 1,440 ha of degraded land on Doi Mae Salong (DMSL), Chiang Rai Province. The project was adopted by IUCN’s 'Livelihoods and Landscapes' Initiative, with tree-planting sponsored by Plant a Tree Today (PATT) Foundation. The restoration sites were exhausted former agricultural areas, on steep slopes, at risk of soil erosion and landslides.

The objectives were

1. to transform degraded areas into forest to honour the Royal Family and
2. to prevent soil erosion.

FORRU-CMU provided technical and scientific assistance to the project (2007-10) Sixty village leaders, local authority officers, school teachers and forestry officers attended 3 workshops, run by FORRU-CMU staff in Chiang Mai, on the general concepts and skills needed for forest restoration.

Subsequently, IUCN organized construction of tree nurseries at 8 village schools in the project area. FORRU-CMU provided training in tree nursery techniques on-site at the 8 school tree nurseries during 2009. The FORRU-CMU team ran a series of educational and training events at the schools,  covering seed germination, potting trees, care of trees in the nursery, as well as tree planting and aftercare.

Seed collection was identified as requiring special attention. To address this, FORRU-CMU organized a “forest children” (“look mai pah”) club program. Children got involved in labelling target seed trees —"treasure trees"—, collecting seeds from them and also helping to germinate them. Participating children became members of the club, and accumulated points on a membership card, in exchange for rewards.

In addition, an experimental plot was established to test the suitability of the framework species method of forest restoration (FORRU, 2006) near Ban Lo Yo, in collaboration with the village committee. FORRU-CMU carried out monitoring of this plot over the year and a technical report, presenting initial results on performance of the planted trees, was submitted to IUCN in December 2009.