The Provincial Council of Granada, Vega Educa and LIFE Wood for Future organized these visits, in which students of 3rd ESO learn to plant cuttings.

The Provincial Council, together with Vega Educa and the LIFE Wood for Future project have organized this week a training sessions in the Provincial Nursery to show students of IES Hispanidad de Santa Fe (Wednesday) and IES Fernando de los Ríos de Fuente Vaqueros (Friday) the environmental and economic importance of poplar, a traditional crop in their municipalities.

The conference consisted of a visit to the Provincial Nursery, under the Delegation of Environment and Animal Protection of the Provincial Council and located in the Cortijo Peinado de Fuente Vaqueros, where schoolchildren have been explained the usefulness of these facilities, where more than 300 different species are grown, both ornamental and forage, cereals and legumes, to provide the municipalities of the province of specimens for parks and public gardens, with the aim of improving their biodiversity, their urban landscape and the health of its citizens.

Next, the third year ESO students, accompanied by their teachers, attended a workshop on cuttings, where they learned how to plant poplar and willow cuttings in their own pots and, once at home, to follow the process of development of the root system of the plants and their growth.

The students have also attended a talk by the coordinator of LIFE Wood for the Future, a project led by the University of Granada and participated by the Provincial Council, through the Delegation of Employment and Sustainable Development, which aims to recover the poplar groves in the province of Granada, with funding from the LIFE Program, an instrument of the European Union dedicated to the environment and climate action.

Antolino Gallego explained the importance of trees and, in particular, the environmental values of poplars, such as their ability to absorb CO2, filter water polluted by agriculture, attract biodiversity, retain soil and refresh the environment.

He also showed them the economic importance of poplar trees in the province and, specifically, in the municipalities of the Vega. Currently most of the wood obtained is used in the manufacture of boxes and packaging, but this raw material, for its strength and flexibility, has enormous potential in the development of structural elements for sustainable construction, such as laminated beams in which Gallego’s laboratory works in the School of Building Engineering of the UGR.

Finally, the students have participated in the planting of cuttings in the nursery, both of poplar species used in the renaturation of river banks, such as the one that the Provincial Council is going to carry out along 12 kilometers of the Dílar river (‘Populus nigra’ and ‘Populus alba’), as well as wood clones (Beaupré, MC and I214).

The organizers have shown their satisfaction with the results of the conference. Traditionally, poplar groves have been part of the vital landscape and have been a key pillar of the economy of Fuente Vaqueros and Santa Fe, but in the last two decades, as in other localities of the Vega de Granada, they have been lost in favor of crops of annual profitability, such as asparagus, garlic or corn. Currently, some 4,000 hectares of poplar groves are cultivated in the province of Granada, compared to 12,000 at the beginning of the century. In this sense, the dissemination activities on the environmental values and economic potential of poplar trees acquire special value when they are aimed at teenagers from these villages, emphasized Rafael Jiménez, head of the Provincial Nursery, Manuel Montoya, coordinator of Vega Educa, and Antolino Gallego.