Enjoying Outside - Recycling Christmas Trees for Aquatic Wildlife

Kristie Ehrhardt • January 9, 2025


Many of the houses in my neighborhood have sad, once-loved Christmas trees lying in the gutter waiting for the “claw” to come pick them up. Green-wasting your post holiday tree is a great idea, it’ll either be composted or run through a chipper and used as ground cover at a school or park but there are other, productive ways to recycle it too!

 

Recycling your holiday tree for aquatic wildlife is a creative and rewarding way to provide habitat for fish and other aquatic wildlife. Various agencies collaborate on local and national projects to enhance and improve aquatic habitat. Collected trees are weighted down with cables and submerged to provide habitat for fish and other aquatic wildlife. The submerged trees provide spawning habitat and refuge for young fish by furnishing hiding spots from predators and shade from sun. The sunken trees also supply a place for algae and tiny aquatic invertebrates which are a food source for the young fish and larger invertebrates. By supplying habitat for young and smaller bait fish, larger fish are attracted to the areas and may upgrade your favorite fishing hole.

 

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife Fish Habitat Technicians collect discarded Christmas trees that will be used for underwater structures in waterways for aquatic wildlife. The gaps between the branches of the upcycled trees provide shelter for young fish and attract larger fish which creates more exciting opportunities for anglers. Fish find and occupy the underwater structures very quickly after they’ve been introduced indicating that they appreciate them. The California Conservation Corps (CCC) teamed up with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and a Chico Boy Scout troop to create several new fish habitat structures near Lake Oroville and Thermalito Afterbay that used over 1,500 donated recycled Christmas trees. Projects and partnerships such as this have been happening for over 30 years throughout California.

 

Some other Northern California projects include fish habitat structures in Juanita, Orr and Trout Lakes from trees collected in Alturas and Yreka as well as a project in Green Springs Reservoir in Modoc County from trees collected in Siskiyou County. The City of Chester is also working on a project in Lassen County. Farther south, Riverside County also works with CDFW to collect trees from county landfills to be used for local fish habitat enhancements.

 

And it’s not just being done in California. The Alleghany National Forest in Pennsylvania has been recycling and submerging Christmas trees since 1983 and has recycled nearly 20,000 trees in the Alleghany River. The recycle program in the Wayne National Forest in Ohio collects over 240 Christmas trees and ties them together in bundles to enhance habitat in local lakes. The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin has used Christmas trees to provide fish habitat for many years and the Hoosier National Forest in Indiana has placed trees in five local bodies of water to improve fish habitat.

 

The trees need to be free of decorations, lights and any flocking but people seem happy to help by dropping their retired trees off at designated locations rather than plopping them in the street. The trees would have ended up in the landfill or a wood chipper and by upcycling them as fish habitat it not only gives the trees another purpose, it helps aquatic wildlife and those enjoying the outdoors as well.


-Kristie Ehrhardt (kehrhardt@tuleyome.org)

Tuleyome Land Conservation Program Manager

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