The Maui News – The Erdman family and Ulupalakua Ranch were honored Tuesday by the Auwahi Forest Restoration Project, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service for their two decades supporting native forest restoration efforts at Auwahi.

The ranch is in the Auwahi ahupuaa, the Native Hawaiian ocean-to-mountain land division, that was noted in early botanical literature as containing one of the richest and diverse forests in Hawaii, said a news release about the ranch being recognized. In pre-European contact days, forests like Auwahi’s were sources for fibers, dyes and wood.

Through the years, introduced feral animals and invasive plant species and fires took their toll on Auwahi’s and all forests on the southern flank of Haleakala, the news release said. Only 2.5 percent of the original forest remained by the 1980s. Auwahi contained what a report called a “museum forest” with only older trees that had not reproduced seedlings for centuries.

With native dryland forests in severe decline, Ulupalakua Ranch partnered with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service in 1997 on a large-scale forest restoration project at Auwahi.

Art Medeiros, program manager and founder of the Auwahi Forest Restoration Project, said projects like Auwahi on private ranch lands are rare and “virtually unprecedented.” The ranch devoted valuable grazing land for the forest restoration without compensation.

The project employed new restoration techniques that increased native species cover from 3 percent to 82 percent and nurtured two thirds of native tree species to produce seedlings. This is “a sign of a healthy functioning ecosystem, including some species that had not done so in centuries,” the news release said.

Since 1997, 125,000 native trees have been planted and more than 1,600 Maui residents have made the trip to the native forest.

“As a result of the community-minded dedication of Ulupalakua Ranch at Auwahi, Hawaiian dry forests have gone from a poster child of ecological failure to a poster child of community-based restoration,” the news release said.

Medeiros noted that in the two decades of working on the project, the ranch has never requested publicity “but instead served largely as a silent and enthusiastic partner.”

“In all my years in conservation, I have never seen another for-profit group act in this way,” he said in thanking the Erdman family, led by father, Pardee, and son, Sumner, who is the ranch manager.

In addition to the ranch, Fish and Wildlife Service and conservation service, the Auwahi project also receives support from the Frost Family Foundation, county Department of Water Supply, Hawai’i Community Foundation, Hawaii Tourism Authority, county Office of Economic Development and the Edward J Anderson Foundation.