What is our Footprint?

How many plants have our Kauri Park ecovitalists grown and sent out to restore New Zealand ecosystems?

This was a question that we have been asked lately. If we go back 25 years to 1995 we were hand writing our invoices and packing slips like almost every business in our sector. These early records were lost in the fire of 2010 (10 years this month).

What we do have is historical financial records and we have taken these numbers and we knew what our average price per plant was. This gave us a fairly good indication of numbers during those years to calculate from.

The number of plants over 25 years was fascinating for us. In a rounded number to the nearest million, Kauri Park have grown 114,000,000 plants for NZ.

The area within a defined shape is a 17.5km x17.5km square or a 20km diameter circle. While this might not seem much at first glance it becomes interesting when we stretch this area out to how we speak about environmental restoration.

We divided the plants up into 3 ranges of planting centres being 2.5m for riparian and forestry type planting, 1m centres for traditional high-density revegetation and 0.6m for wetland and swale type work. Putting these numbers together it gave us an average number of 1.8m centres and an area just over 307km2.

Take a city and plant it up as a solid revegetation planting. We have planted 1/2 of Auckland city and two to three times more than some of our larger urban areas and three times the size of Waiheke Island.

The size of the Kauri Park environmental footprint gets interesting when we start overlapping this with some more tangible scenarios.

Take State Highway 1 from Cape Reinga to the Bluff. It is a 1,990km long road trip with a 95km ferry ride in the middle. Kauri Park has grown enough plants to have almost an 80m (at 1.8m centres) strip of planting either side of the highway from Cape to Bluff.

Kauri Park aim to double the number of plants grown to 200,000,000 by year ending 2026 and have 300,000,000 plants in the New Zealand environment by 2030 as a minimum.

Our vision is to see every stream, river, estuary and piece of marginal land in the country planted - so that native flora and fauna can thrive - so that New Zealand itself is teeming with vital life.