Weeding, propagating and replanting 4 hectares of coastal ebony forest on the restored islet off Mahebourg, and maintaining every seedling to canopy height.
Rs 2,500 propagates and maintains one native seedling through its first three years.
1 March 2026 – 31 December 2027
Île aux Aigrettes carries the last remnant of Mauritius’s dry coastal ebony forest. Restoration there is slow, physical work: exotic species are cleared by hand plot by plot, native seed is collected and grown on in the island nursery, and each planted seedling is weeded and watered for three years before it can hold its own.
This phase covers four hectares on the eastern side of the islet, currently dominated by exotic thickets. The budget funds the nursery through two full propagation cycles, a three-person field team, and the aftercare that decides whether a planted seedling becomes a tree or a statistic.
What a contribution covers
Demo content — an illustrative sample project, not an actual programme of this organisation.
The eastern plots are cleared. Three weeks of hand-weeding took out the exotic thicket across roughly 1.2 hectares without touching the ebony saplings already coming through underneath — there were more of those than the survey predicted, which is the best kind of surprise.
Nursery stock is ahead of schedule: 3,400 seedlings potted on and hardening off, against a target of 3,000 by the end of the quarter. Planting starts with the first reliable rain.
(Demo content.)
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