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Mooney Goes Wild contributor Terry Flanagan shares his latest round up of nature news.
Far too often we hear about deforestation in the news. Whether caused by fire, agriculture, or any other factor - it's not good news. But what comes after deforestation, with luck, is reforestation.
One such positive story comes from Chile.
February 2024 saw a wildfire that devastated Chile's largest botanical garden. Considered the deadliest in Chile's recent history, it killed 136 people, razed entire neighbourhoods, and destroyed 90% of the 400-hectare (990-acre) garden in the coastal city of Vina del Mar.
Park director Alejandro Peirano thinks it is only a matter of time before the wildfires return: "One way or another, we're going to have more fire. That's for sure,"
When the inferno erupted last February, there was little firefighters could do to stop it consuming most of the park in less than an hour.
The Vina del Mar National Botanical Garden, first designed by French architect Georges Dubois in 1918, boasted 1,300 species of plants and trees, including native and exotic ferns, mountain cypresses, Chilean palm and Japanese cherry trees. The park was home to wildlife including marsupials, gray foxes and countless birds.
But nature is slowly healing. Abundant rainfall in 2024 in central Chile - after more than a decade of drought - has already brought green shoots of recovery in the botanical garden.
Weeks ago on one of the garden slopes, dozens of volunteers began to plant 5,000 native trees that are watered through an irrigation system. In two years, the foliage is expected to be large enough to provide shade and encourage the regrowth of other species around them. The tree planting is part of the first stage of a plan to revive the garden through a public-private partnership.
The park is also expected to be reforested with species capable of adapting to "scarce rainfall and prolonged drought," said Benjamin Veliz, a forest engineer with Wildtree, a conservation group involved in the project.
