The Amazon region of Brazil is the world's largest lowland tropical forest zone, and has been called the "green lungs of the Earth" Yet in recent years the forest area has been shrinking rapidly because of over-logging and excessive development.
Today, the depletion of the Amazon lowland forest has become an environmental issue of global significance. In 1992, Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) launched a project to restore an Amazonian tropical rain forest using the Miyawaki method. The site for the project is an abandoned area of infertile wasteland.
The first step was to grow 90,000 potted seedlings, and prepare the area selected for planting. Deep trenches were dug and then filled with soil, bark and wood fragments.
Normally, the soil layer under a tropical forest is shallow. If the ground is left bare, the soil, and the nutrients that it contains, will be washed away during the rainy season. Therefore, the use of planting mounds, and the Miyawaki method of planting a mixture of Balsa and Parapara, which are both dominant local species, resulted in a growth rate of 1.5 to 2 meters in just half a year.

Planting in the first area was followed by a year-long effort that resulted in the planting of 300,000 potted seedlings of 25 to 30 species. The 240 hectares of bare land used for this experiment had been abandoned as wasteland. Since then, a group of local companies and citizens have continued to carry out additional tree plantings. The pace of growth has been remarkable. Just three years after the start of the experiment the trees were 6 to 12 meters tall, and some dominant trees had reached over 15 meters. As the world's first forest regeneration experiment in a lowland tropical forest area, this project has attracted considerable interest among ecologists, forestry experts and other organizations in Brazil and overseas.

Today, balsa trees, which initially grew rapidly, have begun to slow, while other species such as virola surinamensis and ceiba pentandra have begun to catch up. In just a few years, these species are expected to reach 10 meters or more. The development of the forest superstructure has been accompanied by a proliferation of small animals and insects that break down material on the forest floor, over 20 to 25 years, developing into a completely natural forest ecosystem.

NOTE : For the Brazilian project, a wide variety of trees were used in intensive mixed plantings. The mix of trees consisted mainly of local natural species, but ranged from leader to climax species (see Table). The tallest trees grew to 20 meters over seven years, resulting in a stand volume of almost 400 cubic meters per hectare at D2H. However, the rapid growth (see Fig. 2) of a small number of dominant species such as balsa (Ochroma pyramidae), which made up a small fraction of the total, resulted in an unstable stand structure with a division between the upper and lower strata.