Strengthening the resilience of the Rio Grande de Manatí

Para la Naturaleza and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation have been growing their partnership over a few years through their work to strengthen coastal resilience for the Hacienda La Esperza Nature Reserve and the neighboring communities. This initiative engages in diverse forest restoration activities that promote the enhancement of the floodplain, wetlands, and coastal forests in the Reserve in Manatí.

The ultimate goal is to strengthen the ecosystems to better protect these extremely vulnerable coastal communities from future storm and flooding events, while enhancing their habitat and that of fish and wildlife populations. The project, which focuses on reforestation as a habitat restoration practice, is now in its third year of implementation, and has already planted in coastal, wetland and riparian habitats more than 30,000 native trees, which accounts for 65% of the objective to plant 50,000 trees.

During this third year, the project began monitoring the progress of the planting sites in the three habitats (floodplain, beach, and wetland) using acoustic monitoring. The idea of acoustic monitoring is to collect data and in turn identify the presence or absence of species in the different ecosystems that are being impacted. All the information collected is stored in Para la Naturaleza’s database, considering the location of the planting, the species identified and the family, the date of recording, the age of planting, and the absence or presence of canopy. This methodology helps the organization to see and graph how the restoration effort through reforestation are increasing the biodiversity on these habitats, which is an indicator of healthy, established ecosystems.

SUCCESS STORY

Strengthening the resilience of the Rio Grande de Manatí

Help us protect the ecosystems and cultural treasures on the islands of Puerto Rico.