Hilo’s First Annual Community Climate Fair

Last month, our community outreach team Maybeleen and Kili participated in Hilo’s First Annual Community Climate Fair on June 17th, 2023. We were so inspired after interacting with so many wonderful organizations who are working towards a greener Hawaii. This opportunity gave us the chance to meet with the public and share our research. Mahalo Kara Neal for organizing this incredible event, we hope to see you all next year!

The Lowland Wet Forest Working Group visited the Liko Nā Pilina plots and other areas of the forest on May 5, 2023.

In Oct 2021, UH Hilo students visited the field to participate in an outplanting of trees to assist the Hawaii Army National Guard in further developing hybrid forest ecosystems. Students participated as part of the Kāwili Kine Culture program, an inter-departmental program collaboration with the UH Hilo Center for Global Education and Exchange and the University Housing Office, that was created to engage on-campus residents with opportunities in the local community. Read more about it!

We held an event in May 2019 and invited all former project staff and some volunteers to come back and see the changes in the forest. Here we are holding up a timeline of the project (pictured from right to left: Becky Ostertag, Amanda Uowolo, Susan Cordell, Nicole DiManno Martin).

Seedling studies, established plant measurements on growth, seed input and litterfall, and maintenance have been part of regular Pilina objectives this past year, we have also continued phenology studies, soil decomposition experiment and are now wrapping up the two year count of ʻŌhiʻa seeds. The site and crew has managed through several natural disaster warnings and plots remain intact and resilient.

Official start of the experiment. All seedlings planted!

We were fortunate that our plots did not receive any damage from Hurricane/Tropical Storm Iselle, and we are a long way from the current lava flow coming from Kilauea volcano. Our first seedling monitoring effort was a great success! The results are in, and we have more than two orders of magnitude of native seedlings per m2 in our treatment plots than in our reference plots. In other words- while in the reference plots there is less than one seedling per square meter, some of our treatment plots have more than 10 seedlings in the same area!