The Canal Viu platform will carry out a diagnosis at the beginning of September to find out the situation of the 1,376 trees that have been planted in the last year on the sidewalk of the Urgell Canal, in the municipalities of eight towns in Pla d’Urgell.
The entity has advanced the action, after receiving calls from several residents of the region warning that a large part of the trees are drying up.
They attribute it to a lack of continuous irrigation and maintenance and, although they still do not have data, they estimate that a large part will not survive.
“When we have figures, we will try to draw a conclusion as to how there have been so many casualties,” explains Josep Maria Falip, a member of Canal Viu. They ask to replace the trees that do not survive.
Between December 2022 and June of this year, a total of 1,376 trees have been planted on the sidewalk of the Urgell canals. They are specimens of ash, poplar and hackberry trees, as well as plane trees and black maples that have been planted along some 14 kilometres, in the second, third and fourth ditches, and, for the first time, also in the auxiliary channel.
The performance is included in the ‘Paisatges de Ponent’ project and is co-financed by FEDER funds, the Diputación de Lleida and the eight participating municipalities (Barbens, Linyola, Vilanova de Bellpuig, Golmés, Mollerussa, Palau d’Anglesola, Bellvís and Torregrossa) , with an award amount of 158,871.72 euros.
However, from the Canal Viu platform they warn that a good part of the planted trees have died or are dying because they have not been irrigated enough, a situation that has also been aggravated by the drought and high summer temperatures.
“The expectations were that the casualties could be 10% and at the moment I don’t know if with 50% casualties we fall short or not,” explains Josep Maria Falip, coordinator of the network of local entities of Canal Viu.
From the platform they drop that a good part of the participating municipalities, which are in charge of carrying out maintenance, have not watered the trees frequently enough. For this reason, in the diagnosis they will count the casualties for each town and also for each species, to see which ones have adapted better.
The monitoring of the planted specimens will last one week and will be done by local entities of each town or directly from the coordinator of Canal Viu.
The platform will ask that the trees that do not survive be replaced by other specimens. Before replanting, however, they say that the project agreements will have to be analyzed “so that this does not happen again.”
