For Mariame Condé, the seed-collecting work came at a critical time. In January 2022, she was pregnant and nearly out of food. Her husband had left their village to search for gold in Sigiri, a mining area, and their harvest was almost gone, she told Mongabay in a WhatsApp message. That year, Condé collected 20,000 Carapa procera tree seeds from around her hometown in Kofilakoro, Guinea. “The project paid me 1,000,000 GNF [about $115] which was a relief,” she said. “I used the money from arboRise to buy food and clothes for my son.” Since 2021, the arboRise Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit, along with a local partner GUIDRE (Guinea Local Development and Environment), has reforested nearly 4,400 hectares (about 10,900 acres) across 43 villages in Guinea — an area about one-fourth the size of Washington, D.C. Women of Sokourala refill their bowls with mixed tree seeds before sowing. Image courtesy of GUIDRE After the harvest by each seed-collecting family, all tree species are mixed to be allocated for direct sowing onto the landscape. Image courtesy of GUIDRE In each village, arboRise hires local women to collect seeds from 40 native tree species. Each woman gathers around 28,000 seeds as part of a massive effort to revive forests in Guinea’s Kérouané prefecture, the region that holds the source of the Niger River, which winds its way 4,180 kilometers (2,600 miles) through West Africa. The mixed seeds are scattered onto plots rather than directly planted or grown in nurseries. Tree species such…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed