As an Ib student it is important to understand how valuable summer time is especially for a project like this that moves very slowly. On August 23rd, Sebas, Rochelle and I met up at Rochelle’s house to build our mangrove nursery. This nursery would be the home for our many many mangroves that are soon to come.
There was some planning and coordinating that had to be dome but Sebas was able to get the wood from a hardware store in Santa Cruz. After an exhaustive half an hour of carrying the wood around, we were finally ready to build!
While Sebas was putting together the nursery, Rochelle and I were cutting filling up constrainers with mud from the mangrove. We decided that splitting up the work would motivate us most and would be most time efficient. After Sebas finished putting together the boxes we all together finished up filling up containers with mud from the forest (we do this because that way the mangroves can easily adapt once we transfer then back into the forest).
This is what the finished nursery looks like! Once we get more mangroves we will separate and classify the mangroves depending on their size, this will not only help monitor them but also help us understand how much attention they require. For future reference when we have more mangroves we know that we will be able to make more crates and fill them up. As of August 23rd there are around 100 mangroves planted.
After we planted some mangroves we knew we had to take advantage of the mangrove season. So we drove down to a more accessible part of the mangrove where we were able to collect seeds from inside the mangrove. This was a recommendation given to us by the biologist Jemma who said it would ensure for the most successful growth.
We are excited to have taken this first step because now we will be able to efficiently and safely store a large amount of seeds. We plan on reaching a capacity of over 1000 seeds in this nursery!