Tuesday 26 May 2015

Mangrove Day – Monday, May 25, 2015

On May 25, Mangrove Day was a combination of a beach pick up for propagules in the morning and planting and expanding our very own Mangrove nursery at Ventura apartments.

We were picking up live propagules at Uprising Resort beach for about 3 hours filling up bin bags. With a team of about 22 this was highly effective with rough estimates of this pickup of over 5,000 propagules, resulting as one of the best beach pickups we've ever had. In the afternoon we started filling up the empty plastic bottles and planted around 2,000. Thus expanding our nursery from around 5,500 to 7,500. The very exciting thing about this nursery is that there’s room for much, much more. All in all it was one of the most successful Mangrove pick up and planting days we've had in a while.






Mangroves are incredibly important part of conservation of our oceans creatures. Mangroves provide a home and shelter for a big part of ocean juvenile creatures, and if there is a constant decrease in mangrove forests on a global scale, this is a problem for us all. The main steps the Mangrove for Fiji project encounter include; collecting propagules, planting the propagules in a protected garden area, where they can be monitored and nurtured to increase survival rate and the last step planting them in the wild.

By Theo Peeters, England 

Wednesday 13 May 2015

Mangroves for Fiji from a volunteers perspective

The Mangrove for Fiji project, run by Projects Abroad in correlation with the shark conservation project, is a very big and important part of conservation of our oceans creatures. Mangroves create a home and shelter for a big part of the oceans juvenile creatures, and the constant decrease in mangrove forests on a global scale is a problem for us all.

The Mangroves for Fiji project has three main steps; collecting propagules, planting the propagules in a protected garden area, where they can be monitored and nurtured to increase survival rate and the last step planting them in the wild.

A typical mangrove day on the project will start at 9 am. As a group, we will attack the garden. Each person will be given a specific job, which is decided by our staff. There is a number of specific jobs; cutting plastic bottles, filling plastic bottles with nutritious dirt, digging and providing nutritious dirt, placing bottles in/on the ground in squares of one hundred, planting the mangroves in the bottle and watering the plants.

On days where we are in need of propagules, we will as a group go to either a village or a specific beach; here we spent up to 3 hours collecting propagules, and if the collecting is in a village, we will help the local nursery.

Every 2-3 months we will plant the now grown mangroves in the wild. This process is simple; we will go to all our nurseries, where mangroves that show enough maturity will be collected, and brought to a specific location and then planted with one meter distance from each other.

Although mangrove work is not the most popular amongst the volunteers because it is hard work and takes time, many volunteers have described it with the following sentence; “it’s like taking a very long run, it’s tough and it takes time, but the result in the end is visible and a fantastic feeling, especially planting them in the wild”.

I personally have enjoyed seeing the mangrove project expand, especially in the last 2 months. Seeing thousands of plants standing in blocks of hundreds, and knowing that you actually did something to make that happen, is an awesome feeling. Is hard work and some mornings you really don’t want to be in the garden, but the result is something very special.

This week the volunteer team achieved a lot. We not only collected ~3500 propagules from Navua river, but also replaced all the dead propagules in Vunibau village nursery with new live ones and planted an additional 1100, planted 900 propagules in the Ventura nursery, and finally repaired and cleaned up the nursery in Pacific Harbour’s Multi Cultural School and planted an additional 500 propagules there; a successful day all round!!! We now have approximately 10,000 mangrove propagules growing in our nursery areas and this could cover 1 hectare in the wild. 

Until next week when we will make even more progress,


Anders Kallestrup Morgen, 21, Denmark          



Above; Vunibau Village Nursery


Above; Pacific Harbour Multi Cultural School Nursery before. 
Below; Pacific Harbour Multi Cultural School Nursery after.



Above; Ventura Apartment Nursery