Volunteers restore 100,000 native plants in the Santa Monica Mountains

A massive undertaking to restore native plants to the Santa Monica Mountains after prolonged drought and wildfire wiped out much of the vegetation, finished Saturday with 100,000 new plants in the soil.

After 7,000 hours of work from 3,000 volunteers, it's the park's largest ever restoration project according to National Park Service officials.

About 30 high school students from high schools in East Los Angeles joined volunteers on Saturday, the final planting day.

The park embarked on the two-year project, funded by Snap, Inc., the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, and Re:wild, to restore 10,000 trees and 90,000 herbs and shrubs to five sites in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

"Nobody's doing this kind of work – at least on a collective scale," said Joey Algiers, a restoration ecologist who has led the project. "Through long-term monitoring, we discovered that we had lost about 100,000 riparian trees prior to the November 2018 Woolsey Fire. The reason for that includes prolonged drought and other wildfires." 

Algiers said that when Woolsey came along, many more trees and other plants were burned and lost. Restoring plants was a priority for the park. 

Plants for this project were grown from seeds that were locally collected from the Santa Monica Mountains. The restoration of the native shrubs and trees also means a restored habitat for animal and insect life.

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is the largest urban national park in the country, encompassing more than 150,000 acres of mountains and coastline in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.