If you have been involved in any kind of ecological restoration,
the question of seed has probably passed your mind, at least briefly. It was also the subject of a forum and (I
would dare to say) heated discussion at the 24th North American
Prairie Conference. Many issues were
addressed but a couple kept surfacing up. Here are the issues I remember,
please add those I might have omitted to the comments.
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| Blue flag iris seed |
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| seed mix prepared for a restoration project |
1.
How do we obtain seed – meaning where do
nurseries collect the “started” seed from? It was a
a.
geographical
matter - is it Carbondale or Dekalb, IL
b.
Ecological matter – how local should the ecotype
be? how far is too far to travel outside of the project? Should seed planted in
a sand prairie come from a source that was collected on a black soil prairie
c.
a political matter (is the seed available on municipal,
county, state, federal, or private
land?) how long do we have to wait for permits and how to mainstream the
process? Is there a way?
d.
Knowledge matter – where EXACTLY are those
remnant, tiny places where we can collect seed? Is anyone willing to share
their “spots”? (I know I would be hesitant to share it). Tragedy of the commons,
anyone?
e.
Ideological matter – do we collect started seed
from remnants only or do we go to restorations as well?
2.
How do we get enough seed for projects, while we
often don’t know about them years in advance?
a.
How can nurseries be informed of needs in a fair
market driven way and in advance? (I am no economist here)
3.
How do we get the diversity of the seed we need?
a.
Here diversity was the simple alpha diversity
(i.e. number of species)
b.
Functional and seasonal diversity
c.
As well
as genetic diversity
i.
We open the whole Pandora’s box here – do we
collect from few sites and mix seed and call it species x region y seed? Do we
cultivate seed collected at each
4.
How do we preserve the diversity?
a.
If genetic purity is important then how do you
make sure a grower who is growing a couple local genotypes preserves those as “pure”
because pollinators do cross large distances
b.
At which point will we have an inbreeding bottleneck
and the plants at the restoration sites will have a very decreased fitness?
c.
Or outbreeding depression ?
5.
How do we grow plants to preserve their genetic
integrity?
a.
Is the seed we buy for restoration projects domesticated?
b.
Many nursery practices concentrate on the seed
collected at most popular times (both within and among species). When we lose
the early and late seed of the species (2 standard deviations or more removed,
or the “tails” of the Bell curve) how much original genetic material do we
lose? Could those be important alleles?
c.
And what would be an economically sound way to collect
that seed while paying people a livable wage ? (Ok, that was not discussed, I added
that)
6.
Should we source from a bit more south to
prepare the projects for the effects of climate change (the 800 pound gorilla
that no one wants to touch with a 10 ft pole)
7.
Who should worry about all these issues and head
the effort?
a.
How do you involve various levels of government,
nurseries, non-profits, seed lovers etc for common good? How would you define
that common good?
b.
What is the goal?
i.
If the goal is state funding how do we go about
obtaining it?
ii.
Do we propose a plan (and who is we)?
iii.
Do
individual citizens carry out guerilla like meetings with their state
representatives to ask for funding? OR maybe there should be a bill and then we
do a massive PR campaign and push to get it passed (again, who is WE – because it
begins to feel like the royal WE and no one wants to take charge)
I think some of the questions can be answered by looking at
the goals of the project, but not many…
Sometimes I just want to go back to grad school, and do a
whole lot of research to answer these very necessary practical questions people
have…. SIGH
Stay tuned, I will try to have my pondering about this
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