EARTH SANGHA
5101 I Backlick Road, Annandale, VA 22003 www.earthsangha.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: The mission of the Earth Sangha shall be conservation as a psychological, social, and ecological practice. The Earth Sangha shall try to help people develop healthier connections to the lands and waters around them. Wherever the Earth Sangha works, its ecological practice shall focus on preserving or restoring local native-plant species and the natural communities of which those species form a part.

CONSERVATION, ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION, AND HELPING PEOPLE DEVELOP HEALTHIER CONNECTIONS TO THE LANDS AND WATERS AROUND THEM.

DC-Area Wild Plant Nursery:Propagation from the wild of about 320 plant species native to the greater Washington, DC, region for use in local ecological restoration projects. All stock is local ecotype (propagated directly from local wild native-plant populations). Some of these species are rare, either locally or on the state level; we are propagating them at the request of local government agencies, for use on their restoration sites. Our plants are also used in our own projects and in those of other nonprofits, friends of groups, individual restorationists, as well as government agencies managing local parkland and schoolyards. During 2020, about 51,575 native trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants were distributed from the nursery to local forests, meadows, and maintained landscapes.

DC-Area Forest Restoration:On-going work at the 20-acre Marie Butler Leven Preserve in Fairfax County, Virginia. During 2020, the corona virus epidemic greatly reduced our volunteer effort at the Preserve. (We did our best to make sure that the volunteers that we did host, as well as our own staff, followed the standard anti-covid measures masks, distancing, and so on.) All told, about 84 people volunteered about 254 hours of their time to help suppress invasive alien vegetation in the parks 17-acre forest, and to restore native vegetation. Control efforts extended throughout most of the park but are far from complete. We also put in about 970 locally native trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, produced at our Wild Plant Nursery.We did similar work at three other Fairfax County parks: Rutherford, Elklick, and Fitzhugh. At Rutherford, a total of 97 volunteers (over the course of the year, not at once) spent about 290 hours removing invasives, and installing about 310 native plants. At Elklick, we continued our collaboration with the Fairfax County Park Authority on a meadow project that includes several locally rare species. And at Fitzhugh, we worked with the Park Authority to develop a planting plan to bolster the genetic diversity of a variety of native-plant populations in several of the parks meadows. We installed about 835 plants in those meadows.

Tropical Agroforestry: Tree Bank Hispaniola ProgramOperation of a community tree nursery and associated forest-conservation and tree-planting programs on the Dominican side of a portion of the Dominican Republic Haiti border, to slow deforestation and help small-holder farmers increase their incomes. During 2020, about 70 farms participated. Nursery activities were constrained because of the epidemic but we still managed to produce about 20,000 orchard, timber, and local-ecotype native tree seedlings; 13 native species were represented, all of them probably in decline in the wild. Our Forest Credit program, in which our local independent partner organization (the Asociacin de Productores de Bosque, Los Cerezos) extends low-cost credit to small-holder farmers in exchange for forest conservation easements, lent about $36,380 to 55 farms, in exchange for easements over about 341 acres of forest. (The easements are held by our Dominican partner organization.) Our 44.3-acre nature reserve, the regions only community-owned nature reserve, is protecting the headwaters of a village water supply. Our Rising Forests Coffee program is rehabilitating the regions shade-grown coffee, in the wake of the coffee leaf-rust epidemic of 2014-15; the epidemic killed virtually all of the regions coffee trees. Rising Forests is producing rust-resistant coffee trees for planting on local farms, as well as cocoa trees. Both coffee and cocoa are high-value crops that grow best under forest canopy, so our program is creating a powerful economic incentive to conserve forest, and we are continuing to restore additional patches of forest for underplanting with coffee and cocoa.

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