To prevent the excessive re-sprouting of the thinned oak stands, and hence a higher chance of forest fires, the project recommended grazing the area with herds of goats during the years following the cutting operations as a mixture of silvopastoral interventions (oak stand thinning and grazing control) . All of these activities will eventually take pressure off the Cedar trees in the core zone of the Reserve.
Through understanding the grazing pressure, livestock numbers were managed by number and season so that the ground surface and habitat were not degraded.
One of the major lessons learned related to this block is the complementarity of nature: we were designing a project related to forest management, and one of the successful solutions was to resort to goats to prevent re-sprouting. It allowed the understanding of the silvopastoral system by bringing the forest and livestock management system back into balance with each other.