Over 39,000 rare & endangered saplings from Western Ghats planted at Anandvan

Pune: Over 39,000 native and rare species of plants from Western Ghats were planted over 150 acres of land in Mohammadwadi, Undri and Yewalewadi over last year.
The initiative is a combined effort of Anandvan Foundation and the state forest department to create urban forest in Pune district. The department signed an MOU in March last year with Anandvan Foundation for redevelopment of 198 hectares of forest land in Wanowrie, Mohammadwadi, Undri, and Yewalewadi over a period of seven years. The foundation will sign a tri-party agreement with the forest department and two other agencies for funding the project, during which over 200,000 trees would be planted by the foundation, along with other activities such as introducing self-sustainable water resources.
As part of the same, the foundation planted over 39,000 trees, over five feet tall, all native species. The seeds for the plantation were collected by volunteers who partake in trekking activities across the ghats, where they assess the species prominently present. The seeds are brought to the foundation's nursery where they are sprouted and grown into saplings over a period of one year, after which they are planted on the allotted land.
As of now, the nursery houses over 25 species of saplings, such as kusumb tree, Spanish cherry, bhokar, shivan, karanj, and many more. "When we started the plantation work, we did not find many native saplings in the nurseries, and if we found them, they were extremely expensive. Moreover, because some native trees are slow growing, they are not bought often by people, and nurseries do not keep them anymore. People also often tend to buy invasive species of plants because of how fast they grow, and they do not know if they are native or not. This is why it was important for us to keep the nursery and develop a repository of these plants so that they don't remain in the ghats. They were a part of Pune before," said Bhupesh Sharma, founder secretary of the foundation.
The forest department said that the initiative must continue as this prevents the plants from going extinct or becoming extremely rare due to urbanization. "It was particularly heartening to see the efforts made to propagate and plant rare, endangered, and threatened indigenous plant species," said Shomita Biswas, principal chief conservator of forests (HOFF), Maharashtra, in a letter to the foundation.
Meanwhile, the foundation members said that over two acres of land were burnt due to forest fires recently. "In order to deal with this, we have started creating natural barriers around every acre of plantation that will help in water retention and reduce fires, which mostly are man-made," added Sharma.