Aug 2 2020 - Paw Paw

How much overall forest cover remains in Southern Ontario? (  ) 25% (  ) 10% (  )  5% From the Quick Facts About Carolinian Canada below, you can see that it is just over 10% for forest cover.  I've heard estimates of less than 5% for native Carolinian forest left. 25% of Canada's population on 0.25% of its area More endangered and rare species than any other life zone in Canada A great diversity of wildlife of all kinds, including many species not found elsewhere in Canada. Less than 2% of the landscape is in public ownership 73% of the landscape is in highly productive agriculture. Forest cover has been reduced from 80% to 11.3% Forest interior has been reduced to just 2% Wetlands reduced from 28.3% to 5.1% The Paw Paw tree was once a prolific Carolinian fruit tree. I've seen it in a few gardens in Niagara.  Here's a conservation effort to increase its numbers: "As a forest restoration ecologist, Ben Porchuk walks the talk. His home garden is like a museum of rare and endangered Ontario plants. He has flowers and trees of every size and description, from the ultra rare cucumber tree (one of the last 100 of its kind) to a chinquapin oak. Almost all of them are native to the Carolinian zone, a thin humid sliver of the province that stretches across Ontario's southernmost fringe.  Among some of his most prized species is the pawpaw – North America's largest native tree fruit. "The taste is out of this world," Porchuk said. "It's like a banana, mango, custard combination."  Porchuk works for Carolinian Canada, a charity dedicated to preserving, protecting and restoring Ontario's Carolinian forest. Hundreds of years ago pawpaws grew in abundance in the Carolinian. Because of its rich taste, Indigenous people planted them near their communities and along many of their trade routes.  Today, the tree only grows in about a dozen places and is one of the rarest species in Canada.  "They're extremely limited now and extremely rare," Porchuk said, noting today's population of the tree is less than half of a per cent of its size before Europeans arrived.  In fact, it was Europeans who nearly wiped them out. Porchuk said settlers torched the landscape, clearing out vast sections of rare Carolinan forest, whether they intended to farm the land or not.  "They wanted to change the climate to have it less humid and warmer and drier to have less mosquitoes," he said. Here's the Betterphoto Finalist from last month's contest.

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