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Volunteers plant 1,500 trees at Cetti Bay

by Breanna Lai, for KUAM News

Guam - The Department of Agriculture and Guam 350 planted 1,500 trees on three acres in less than two hours Saturday morning with the help of 205 volunteers.  Guam 350 is a local grassroots organization that supports the Global350.org organization whose goal is to reduce the carbon dioxide emission rate from its current 390 parts per million to the desired 350 parts per million.  

Jay Quinata, special projects coordinator for Department of Agriculture, said their goal is to plant enough trees to prevent the erosion in the Cetti Bay area that is negatively impacting the reef and the global marine.  "Right now we have a lot of sword grass locally known as sakati, which are overgrowing our trees and creating a lot of erosion.  Because they're not strong enough to hold the soil together and when that erosion goes down to the river it affects the reef beyond that," he explained.

Ruddy Estoy a forester for DOA, explains what types of trees they use to counteract the erosion.  "So what we're going to do is have them alternate acacia, native, acacia, native, with six-foot spacing and the nutrients from this will help the native trees grow faster,' he demonstrated.

Quinata said they have a total of 500 acres of government property that they plan on reinforcing throughout the next 8 to 9 years. He said this plantation will help increase the growth of the ecosystem.  "It's our island, it's your future, it's our kid's future, go green is the best thing to do.  If we don't do anything now we don't know what's going to happen in the future. We want the beauty back, we want Guam back, and tourism will probably pick up more.  At the same time our ocean our green bays our reef will be more filled with a variety of fish and the global climate will also decrease," he said.

The Department of Agriculture said they were surprised at how fast the volunteers planted the 1,500 trees this past Saturday. Quinata said he is deeply grateful to all the science teachers of the teens who came out as they have taken science outside of the classroom. 

"There's a lot of students who are volunteering not just from the science classes, but from other classes that are coming out to do an organization and help plant trees to make a difference and then ten years from now they can back out there and say this is the forest that I built," he said.