Our Mission
The mission of Wild Woods Restoration Project is to restore the health and diversity of our Hudson Valley forests with local native plants grown by volunteers and to inspire a passion for continued stewardship.
What We Do
We help preserve the rich biological diversity of life in our region. We work with community volunteers to:
- Collect seeds that are native to the local ecotype
- Store seeds for future use at the Mid-Atlantic Seed Bank
- Hold seed cleaning and sowing workshops and potting up workdays
- Provide support to the volunteers as they grow plants at their own homes over the growing season
- Provide the expertise to select appropriate restoration sites and target species for restoration projects
- Plant the seedlings we’ve grown
- Partner with preserves for native planting restoration projects
Why
Although they look green, forests in our region are suffering. Multiple stressors have caused their degradation including:
- Invasive species
- Over-browsing by deer
- Habitat loss
- Climate change
We need to help our forests because they serve so many important functions— especially as storage reservoirs of carbon that help to combat climate change.
Efforts to restore forests by planting trees alone often fail in their restoration goal because they overlook the rest of the forest, the understory. Healthy forests require a diversity of structural layers to function, all parts of a forest work together to form a healthy ecosystem.
We are losing the diversity of our forests, and land managers don’t have the support they need. Our local parks and preserves work to manage their lands but all too often, once stressors are removed there are few existing native seed sources to regenerate the native community naturally. Parks and preserves often lack the resources to purchase or plant native species to restore these areas.
We are a part of the solution.