The National Arbor Day Foundation in Nebraska City, Nebraska, has announced a $50 million, fifty-year initiative with Enterprise Rent-A-Car to plant fifty million trees throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

The organization will work with the U.S. Forest Service to plant a million seedlings in national forests each year for the next fifty years to restore areas damaged by fires, storms, and disease, as well as to expand and preserve habitats for endangered species. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Forest Service is struggling to cope with tight budgets and record wildfires, which have burned nine million acres of wilderness so far this year, surpassing the record set in 2005.

Although the effort will only reforest an estimated 100,000 acres, the need is clear. Lloyd Irland, a forestry scientist at Yale University, told the Post-Dispatch, "Traditional ways of funding [reforestation] have been shrinking while the need to be doing something has increased."