Environmental service organization Aggie Replant has been keeping Texas green since 1991.
Aggie Replant is best known as the host of the annual Replant Day in the fall, in which students volunteer to plant as many trees as they can around Bryan-College Station for one day. There is a need for more trees to be planted in these local areas because as College Station develops, more trees are cut down to make room for more development, according to renewable natural resources sophomore and Aggie Replant director Claire Unruh.
Aside from Replant Day, the organization has participated in other large-scale tree planting events such as Taking Root at Lake Somerville and Trees for Blanco. According to Unruh, these projects can be very beneficial for the environment.
“We recently just took part in a tree planting event at Lake Somerville, which is a government-owned lake and Texas park,” Unruh said. “We went out and planted trees there because due to flooding, the lake water level fluctuates. Because there was a lot of flooding, it was killing trees. They wanted to replace them to prevent future flooding, so they took a lot of volunteers to go do that.”
Every replant event takes months of planning, said former director and industrial distribution senior Hunter Williams.
“The most memorable event for me was definitely Replant Day, just because so much planning had to go into it for me,” Williams said. “It is what I spent basically all August to early October doing, making sure that everything was all in line for us to get that event set up.”
Kickoff executive and economics sophomore Matthew Sandoval said while Aggie Replant was initially created to address environmental needs caused by Aggie Bonfire, the organization is now centered on service and community.
“It really does bring people together, which is really cool just to see people bond over something they may not have done before such as tree planting,” Sandoval said.