This is an excerpt from Episode 143 of The Plant A Trillion Trees podcast.
With International Society of Arboriculture-certified arborists Eva Monheim and Hal Rosner.
Eva: Matthew Aghai is a dedicated reforestation expert, applied scientist, and executive leader at Mast Reforestation. He currently serves as the Vice President of Research and Development at Mast Reforestation, General Manager of Cal Forest Nurseries, and advisor to Silvaseed Company.
His recent work focuses on scalable solutions for mitigating climate change through the development of new initiatives to modernize the reforestation supply chain and connect to reforestation initiatives with natural capital markets.
Matthew has been featured in several national publications for his work and real impacts, including a National Geographic article discussing national seed limitations, Mongabay articles discussing his team’s pioneering work in aerial seed technology, and also many peer reviewed publications.
Matthew is also a practiced and enthusiastic public speaker and actively seeks opportunities to engage with anyone and everyone about finding solutions to the challenges facing the world’s forests.
Welcome to the Planet Trillion Trees Podcast, Matthew.
Hal: First of all, tell us, Matthew, how you found your way to the great work that you’re doing today, and tell us about the great work you’re doing today.
Matthew: I’m very fortunate to have found my career path and I think I’m very fortunate because I was quite focused early on. I’m entering my third decade of thinking about reforestation, thinking about habitat and seedlings.
Where this all started was actually very far from where I work now on the west coast, in the western U.S. I grew up in Chicago. Early on, I was inspired and was thinking about the world from a very global perspective, a lot of imagination and dreaming as you can imagine. When I turned 17 and it was time to go to college, I took a step to go to wildlife and natural resource management, and the best program that I could find in the region was at Purdue University. So, since I was 17, I dialed in and I started working on a wildlife biology and forestry degree, my bachelor’s, and the rest is really just a series of dedications to both academic, public and private ventures that have really taken me all around the entire world. Since those days of being a student, I threw my hat in the ring for work at nurseries around the U.S., I moved to the west. I found projects that took me as far as the Middle East and got to work on things like the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative. I’ve been all over Europe doing this work and then really have dedicated my career to the western U.S. and some of these tropical engagements that have made for good forays into a different space.
When I met the CEO and founder of Drone Seed, it was really a perspective change because it was an opportunity to basically put myself in a position to think about how to scale the problems that I was solving at a very community level. Since then, that was about 5-1/2, almost 6 years ago, we built a lot of technologies, tools and processes to solve this big problem of scaling reforestation with automation. We have since recently rebranded and folded in a much bigger solution which is modernizing the reforestation supply chain in the western United States.
Eva: I think that’s the key, keeping yourself abreast of what’s new, what’s happening, feeling the pulse of the industry. When you were talking about drones, we just interviewed gentlemen from Globe, a drone company, and they are planting with drones over in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Certainly, there’s so many new analogies that are helping you as a forester to make things better. And, if you could, if you could tell us a little bit more about how you gather your seed for planting, how planting is done, that would be great for us and our listeners.
Matthew: I’d love to share that I think this is an often overlooked and critical component of the reforestation supply chain and I think it’s relevant to rural and urban conversations about how we actually create resilient and healthy forest systems or urban forest environments. So our process really is founded in the needs of the Western United States, and if you get west of the Mississippi, you know we’re talking about forests that are primarily dominated by conifer taxa.
West of the Mississippi, there’s something like 90 to 100 conifers that dominate or are the primary component of the structure of our forests outside of riparian areas and there are 600 or so angiosperms. But, really, the conifers are the basis of that forest structure from the canopy all the way down to the bugs and things that are the soil. So our emphasis really on this collection is to try to make sure we are focusing on how to get those conifer seeds into our seed bank.
The conifers that we bank have a type of dormancy mechanism that allows them to be stored really well when the seed is dry. So we’re taking advantage of an evolutionary potential and we try to get the cones of these conifers at the right time when they’re ripe, which is a short period during the late summer. We dry them down further in our kilns. Then we test them, purify them, clean them and get them into our seed banks.
Hal: With your seed collection initiatives, can you just kind of run through the seeds that you collect both conifer and deciduous?
Matthew: Definitely, the majority of the work is in conifers, so I’ll start there. Conifers have physiological dormancy as I alluded to earlier. So, we primarily are focusing on getting them ripe off of the tree and that means that we try to focus on areas that we know we can access during that ripe period. Right now that’s spanning about 11 western states and we try to focus on areas where we have current projects and development.
Unlike a timber company or some sort of fiber production operation, we don’t limit ourselves to one or two very fast growing or good wood product species or high value wood product species. We actually would like to capture every and all species that exist or used to exist on that particular site. The reason for that is we want to use a much more diverse set of species that were part of the historic community. Our thesis is based on really good and well-established science that says that a more resilient community will have both species diversity and structural diversity. By collecting from many different species that were part of that historical community assemblage and bringing them back as seedlings and planting them in non-plantation scenarios, we’re able to create these much more diverse and potentially much more resilient forests, resistant and resilient to not only wildfire, but things like insects and other perturbations, temperature extremes, etc.
So, an example, for instance, would be we collect Douglas fir in the forest of western Oregon and Washington, but we’re also collecting western red cedar, western hemlock. In some cases, we do get into the deciduous species like alder and maple, we are also starting to put ourselves in a position to start collecting oak. But the challenges with these are that they are recalcitrant seed, they don’t have the same dormancy mechanism, so unlike that conifer seed they won’t store well in a freezer and they have to be handled very differently. Unless I actually have a line of sight to a place to plant them or someone to sell them to, to plant them, it’s very hard to be able to collect them and just hang on to them in hopes of having that nursery space and that planting ground. In order to expand the breadth of species, to move beyond that conifer focus, and into the angiosperms we actually need to create a project flywheel and a little bit of a demand and train consumers to understand that angiosperms are part of our forests.
This episode of The Trillion Trees podcast was edited by the ELA publications committee.
Eva Monheim, photo by Kathy Jentz
Eva Monheim is a speaker, horticultural and environmental consultant, garden coach, and an award winning university educator. She is a faculty member at Longwood Gardens for the Professional Horticulture Program and Continuing Education Department. Monheim was an assistant professor at Temple University where she taught numerous subjects to undergraduate and graduate students in horticulture and landscape architecture
Many of her students have gone on to be leaders in the horticulture and green industry as well as doctors in plant science and related fields.
Monheim’s other endeavors include directing, producing, and co-hosting the award winning The Plant a Trillion Trees Podcast, which is heard in over 110 countries. She is also a Certified Arborist. Monheim authored Shrubs & Hedges: Discover, Grow, and Care for the World’s Most Popular Plants, which was nominated by The Council on Botanical & Horticultural Libraries for outstanding contributions to the literature of horticulture. Monheim is co-principal of Verdant Earth Educators, LLC (VEE) a company that writes educational documents and standards, SOPs, landscape management plans, and trains professionals in the green industry.
Hal Rosner started in the tree care business during a high school spring break, sophomore year. His grandparents ran their tree business, The Care of Trees, with three stake body trucks parked in the driveway of their home in Glenview Illinois.
An eclectic course of education after high school followed, including studying ornamental horticulture at Kishwaukee College in Malta IL; environmental studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, and journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia.
His post-college career started with The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Philadelphia Green Program, working as a coordinator and community organizer for street tree plantings and other greening projects in low-income neighborhoods. He then joined the Morris Arboretum, serving as chief arborist and where he also coordinated workshops for tree care professionals.
As an ISA Board Certified Master Arborist, Hal has spent the better part of his career working in the private sector, working closely with institutional and residential clients diagnosing tree problems to help people maintain safe and healthy tree collections. As a NOFA Accredited Organic Land Care Professional, he maintains a focus minimizing pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
