Mark Nicholson
Other projects
The aim of this project is to create a tropical montane forest and to protect & conserve upland plant diversity in the Kenyan highlands by using native plant species in a district that has lost 99.9 percent of its natural forest.
Plants for Life International is a Kenya registered NGO that is replanting about 50 acres with indigenous forest. We have collected, conserved and recorded around 1000 plant species of which over 250 are native trees of the uplands of Kenya. The project began in 2001 and
The project addresses the following issues.
- Loss of indigenous plant and animal biodiversity in upland Kenya
- Loss of indigenous knowledge on indigenous and medicinal plants
- Environmental education
- Carbon sequestration using indigenous forest rather than exotic tree species
- Domestication, cultivation and harvesting of medicinal plants
- Watershed protection and soil OM and fertility restoration
- Collection of rare, threatened, vulnerable and endangered plant species (especially lianes, lianas, climbers, ferns and orchids) from forest and upland biomes under threat (e.g. W. Mau)
- Once the forest planting is complete by the end of 2012, we aim to be self-supporting through income generation from:
- Indigenous medicinal plants
- Ecotourism (bird and tree walks)
- Locally produced energy-efficient charcoal