This shift will be dedicated to watering some of the vulnerable trees throughout the park.
Tree growth is a slow process and in Texas, it is often even slower, and it is primarily due to two factors, too much heat from the sun and lack of water. When left to nature, forests expand by small saplings growing from seeds or from existing roots around the base of a tree. As these saplings grow, they depend heavily on the mother tree to protect them from too much sunlight and evapotranspiration, or the loss of water from the soil into the air. This process is very slow and can only happen around existing trees. When humans plant larger trees in a clearing those trees require a lot more resources to survive than little baby saplings and they don’t get help from other trees; often they lose too much water, and their roots fail to become established in the soil, and the tree dies. In order to protect these invaluable young trees, we need to supply them with the water they need until they can establish a healthy root system in the soil that will allow them to survive on their own.