On April 23 and 24, 2025, the restoration site Las Americas 7a were impacted by a severe wildfire. Around 57 hectares of this area were planted on in 2023 and 2024. In these areas, a total loss of the planted trees is to be expected, which means a total number of approx. 425,000 seedlings (this corresponds to approx. 10.5% of the total seedlings planted in 2023 and approx. 14% of the total seedlings planted in 2024).
For the affected areas that were planted in 2021 (90 ha) and 2022 (82 ha), the damage cannot yet be assessed in detail. Only after the coming rainy season, we will be able to assess how many of the trees will recover or resprout. Another 14 hectares of land were affected, where restoration work had not yet been started.
After several days of heavy rain we observed moderate flooding in our sites Las Americas 1, 6 and 7. The peak of the flooding was around the 6th of October. Across all these sites, a total of 51.2 ha were affected by some degree of standing water, in most cases limited to a few centimetres or less and limited to a few days. The most heavily affected area was Las Americas 7a. In that area, we planted a mix of tree species specialized on growing in contexts with large amounts of water. Therefore, we do not expect that we will experience excess mortality as a result of this flooding. In most cases, this added water was at levels where it was more likely to be beneficial than harmful for the plants.
The maps were made by using SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data (vv and vh bands) from Sentinel 1 satellite of ESA. Water locations were calculated for the 5th to 9th of October.
