Students start a mini forest

Other cities in the U.S have used the Miyawaki Method to grow their urban tree canopy cover. In fact, students at Western Washington University in Bellingham planted a mini forest using the method two years ago.

Students working in the university’s Learning Environment Action Discovery, or LEAD, restoration program noticed that an empty lot, co-owned by the college and the city, was in need of some care. It was overgrown by invasive species and filled with junk, said Beau Jay, who is a graduate student at Western and the co-director of LEAD.

“ So they started working on removing those invasive species and they began to read more about Dr. Akira Miyawaki's method of creating mini forests, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we could totally do this in the Pacific Northwest,’” Jay said.