In his previous life, Matt Hill worked on Wall Street as a quantitative analyst (a.k.a. a “quant”) for stock portfolios worth billions of dollars. Now, at the helm of a forest conservation nonprofit in Madagascar, he finds himself applying the same data-driven approach he used in his former career to restore the island’s imperiled forests.

Madagascar is on track to lose all of its rainforest within 60 years, according to a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change. That loss would be devastating from an ecological standpoint, as many of the plants and animals living in those forests are endemic to Madagascar. It would also threaten the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on the rainforest for their food, shelter, medicine, and fuelwood.

These days, Hill lives on a 5-hectare (12-acre) farm on Madagascar’s east coast, around 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of the city of Toamasina, with his wife, Catherine Sangotra Hill, who grew up there, and their 3-year-old daughter. His parents-in-law, who live in the same village, lead a traditional Malagasy lifestyle. They get nearly everything they need from the rainforest on the extended family’s communal land and surrounding fragments, from the palm leaves they stitched together to make their thatched roof, to the curative tea leaves Sangotra Hill’s mother gathers whenever a family member falls sick.

But that’s becoming harder and harder. “It used to be she’d walk five minutes to find that plant. Now she’ll walk two hours,” Hill says. His mission is to support those who want to live traditionally by restoring their dwindling rainforest.

Madagascar’s countryside is a far cry from Hill’s previous home of Manhattan. But hailing originally from a small, unincorporated town in northern Florida, he says he always felt like a misfit on Wall Street. “I never took to the Wall Street lifestyle,” he says. “The money was just excessive, and at some point, you have enough money.”

So, in 2011, at the age of 40, he retired and went traveling. After visiting 20 different countries, he landed in Madagascar and decided to stay. The plan was to “chill and be retired,” but Hill soon found himself participating in a string of local projects ranging from education initiatives to protecting coral reefs. “Madagascar is kind of like a broken-down old house. It needs a lot of things fixed.”

It was in 2014 when he pitched in to plant trees for a local farmer that something clicked for Hill. The man had been burning wood to make charcoal when his fire got out of control and scorched his farm, along with 8 hectares (20 acres) of nearby rainforest. Hill realized that he could apply his data skills to work out better ways to regrow native plants on charred land. That same year, he started a nonprofit organization called Green Again: Madagascar.

Green Again relies on donations and grants to cover its yearly budget of around $20,000, most of which goes toward paying 14 full-time Malagasy employees as well as contract crew members. To date, the crew have planted approximately 57,000 trees throughout four regions located in a narrow strip along Madagascar’s east coast: Antetezambaro, Fanandrana, Mahatsara and Ampasimbe, all part of the traditional area of the Betsimisaraka people.

Madagascar’s rainforest is increasingly threatened by fires that start accidentally by slash-and-burn agriculture, or tavy, and blaze out of control. Sylvie Andriambololonera, a botanist with Missouri Botanical Garden’s conservation program in Madagascar, describes this traditional farming method: “A selected area is burnt down by first clearing trees, then they are left to dry for weeks, then the area with dry plants is lit; the cleared plot of land is now ready to receive the seeds of rice, maize, or cassava cuttings, grown for self-subsistence.”

She says that from June to October, tavy causes “greyish smoke clouds everywhere, sometimes making the air unbreathable.” It has contributed significantly to the island having lost 44% of its natural forest cover between 1953 and 2014.

To counter the forest loss, a slew of tree-planting initiatives have popped up in recent years. Just this year, Madagascar’s government launched an ambitious campaign to plant 60 million trees to celebrate 60 years of independence.

But reforestation isn’t as simple as planting lots of trees, says Robin Chazdon, an expert in tropical forest restoration at the University of Connecticut. She says the same issue afflicts many tree-planting efforts in the tropics: a laser focus on hitting planting targets to satisfy donors with little concern about tracking the trees over time. “It’s what we call donor-driven restoration,” Chazdon says.

For forest restoration to really work, Andriambololonera says that in addition to putting trees in the ground, it’s vital to gather data on them. “Documenting the outcomes of reforestation over the long term and starting large-scale monitoring is critical to understanding the effectiveness and process of restoration,” she says. “The most important thing is that we are able to collect data, notice changes, and learn.”

Although few projects have adopted it, that approach is gaining approval among reforestation experts internationally. Chazdon agrees that reforestation can have far greater success if practitioners develop an evidence base to guide which tree species to plant, where and when to plant them, and how to grow them. To that end, she has been sifting through reports from larger-scale planting initiatives to learn how well their trees survived, and to gather details like which species they planted and how the seeds were procured and raised, but she hasn’t found many answers. “Mostly what you find is, ‘We planted 500,000 trees in this location.’”

Green Again, on the other hand, takes a more data-centered approach to restoration, says Chazdon, who met Hill last summer at a tropical biology conference in Madagascar.

Data is a critical element of Hill’s work, owing to his days as a financial analyst. Despite the change of scenery and mission, he finds unexpected parallels between his former and current work. “That same database structure and mathematics that goes into tracking a single stock in a giant portfolio like I managed is almost the same as the database and math used to track a tree growing in a forest,” he says.

To gather data, Hill relies on local crew members, many of whom are the grandchildren of the landowners who seek Green Again’s help. After planting trees, giving each one a unique tracking number and taking its GPS coordinates, the crew members return at least once every year for the first five years to measure their growth and enter the information into databases.

Marcellin Velo joined Green Again in 2015 as a laborer and is now the group’s regional director for Antetezambaro, where he grew up. He says one of the perks of his job has been the chance to learn computer skills, which were not covered at his high school.

Most crew members never used a computer before joining the nonprofit. Hill says they often come on board lacking even more basic skills like holding a pencil correctly. They receive extensive on-the-job training to get to the point where they can enter data into Excel spreadsheets. “The crew that have been with us five years get a free beer at lunch when they enter data quicker than me … and they can!” he says.

Using computer code that he adapted from his finance days, Hill enforces strict checks and balances on the databases. He can compare newly entered data to average values based on years of nursery records in a matter of seconds to spot mistakes. “It is stressful that there’s no room for error with our data results,” Velo says. “One hundred percent correct is difficult to achieve each and every workday.”

Sangotra Hill, who works as a regional director for Green Again, says the level of oversight is atypical for rural Madagascar, as is the rigid work environment. “Punctuality to start work, measured lunch breaks, and leaving work unfinished when the clock says we’re finished are also very foreign to people in the Malagasy countryside,” she says. “Everyone has heard that this is how foreigners work and live but it’s still quite shocking when you first work in that type of environment yourself.”

But Velo says he believes the emphasis on quality ultimately benefits the reforestation effort. “More of the trees survive using Green Again’s data-centered approach compared with tree survival rates with other organizations I’ve worked at.”

Hill says around 70% of the trees survive to two years. With the help of his crew, he is running a dozen experiments to find out what works best when it comes to planting rainforest in eastern Madagascar. A few years back, he turned one of those experiments into a master’s thesis at the University of Minnesota. His plan was to study what types of trees suppress invasive ferns.

After spending close to a year planting 4,000 trees, an accidental forest fire burned the entire experiment down. Luckily, Hill was able to salvage the project with the data he and his crew had already gathered.

“If it had been anybody but us, that would have been a total loss. But because of all of our detailed information, we were actually able to make a first-of-its kind study out of it on what tree species can survive a forest fire,” says Hill.

Six of the 11 tree species in the experiment — including the endemic Madagascar almond tree (Terminalia mantaly) — withstood the fire. Green Again is now putting those findings into action by planting the fire-retardant species as living breaks where fire accidents are likely to occur and in rings around species more vulnerable to fire.

The experimental approach is “something [Hill] takes very seriously,” Chazdon says. “It means you have to collect the data on what’s growing and what isn’t and how you can improve things in the future, always with an eye towards adaptive management and making things better not only for the ecological outcomes but also for the social and economic outcomes.”

Sangotra Hill says she finds the insights gleaned from the experiments helpful when she’s trying to convince landowners to plant native tree species. She says statistics on growth and survival that are available on many foreign trees are hard to find on Malagasy species. “People are more likely to plant and use native Malagasy tree species ifthey have the same statistical knowledge that is equal to what is documented about exotic tree species from Australia or America,” she says.

With a growing number of families seeking Green Again’s assistance, Hill has plans to expand the reach of the nonprofit by 2050. “We’d like to have a nursery center every 25 kilometers [15 miles] — half a day’s walk — so that any Betsimisaraka farmer who is interested in continuing the traditional Malagasy way of life can reach us for advice and guidance,” he says.

Those who live traditionally enjoy a “solid, low-center of gravity existence,” Hill says. “But the one thing that they can’t survive is not having the rainforest.”

Banner image: Madagascar’s eastern rainforest is home to a multitude of plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. Image by Matt Hill.

Citations:

Morelli, T. L., Smith, A. B., Mancini, A. N., Balko, E. A., Borgerson, C., Dolch, R., … Baden, A. L. (2019). The fate of Madagascar’s rainforest habitat. Nature Climate Change, 10(1), 89-96. doi:10.1038/s41558-019-0647-x

Hill, D. M. (2018). Forest restoration in Eastern Madagascar: Post-fire survival of select Malagasy tree species (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/201001

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AgricultureConservationdata collectionFiresForest FiresLand RightsRainforest AgricultureRainforest ConservationRainforest DestructionRainforest PeopleRainforestsReforestationSlash-and-burnTreesAfricaEast AfricaMadagascar

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