Two speakers present a regenerative project at Trout Lake in East Vancouver using floating coir rafts planted with native wetland species to improve water quality and create aquatic habitat. The Vancouver Park Board will maintain the installation, which aims to foster community stewardship of the restored lake.
Well, we're building a regenerative aquatic ecosystem project. This was something I did together with a group in Scotland, and I thought it's a wonderful way of doing something practical. And the theme of our conference, Bluetech Forum, is radical collaboration for regeneration. So it seems we should be doing something that's actually practical and we can leave behind us here in Trout Lake to improve the water quality in John Hendry Park. Well, you have these floating rafts. They're made out of core, which is a coconut fiber. And that coconut fiber provides the place where you can put these aquatic plants, which are natural to British Columbia, so they then grow, and over time, it will just develop and form a habitat.
So on the island, we chose native species to this region, but also chose them to specifically be wetland plants and shoreline plants that could get established, but also help us out in the longer term with providing habitat and water quality. The park board in Vancouver recognizes the generosity of this donation, and now it's ours to steward. And I hope that a number of forum delegates come back and check in on his progress over the next few years, becoming an important habitat in John Henry Park.
What we're doing here is that the whole of East Vancouver is undergoing regeneration, social regeneration. And once people start to see something beautiful and living in this lake, they start to relate to it in a different way and appreciate it and value it. And once you can bring people out and get them to connect with that, that's a really key part of then also the restorative part of the ecosyste. It.
