Restoration Accelerator™

Extreme weather and wildfires, intensified by climate change, are damaging the native plant communities of landscapes across the United States. Native plant communities are foundational to thriving ecosystems, delivering goods and services that regulate the environment and support life, provide food and shelter for a wide range of native animals, and embody a wealth of genetic information with many beneficial applications... As the vulnerabilities of humans, wildlife, and critical ecosystem services to these disruptions grow, the need for ecological restoration in the 21st century will continue its trajectory toward a previously unmatched scale. —"An Assessment of Native Seed Needs and the Capacity for Their Supply (final report)," National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2023

The Restoration Accelerator™ program is a response to trends affecting our organization, our region, and the country as a whole:

1. Government agencies need unprecedented quantities of common native plants to restore habitats on fire- and storm-damaged public lands, as reported above.
2. The expanding pollinator-gardening and lawn-alternative movements are driving greater retail demand for native plants to provide habitat for insects, birds, and other organisms. (2024 National Gardening Survey, National Gardening Association and National Wildlife Federation)
3. Even as demand rises, a well-documented bottleneck in the supply chain across the country has resulted in a shortage of locally adapted seed from sustainably managed sources. (Native Plant Materials Use and Commercial Availability in the Eastern United States, Tangren and Toth, 2020)
4. Native Plant Trust cannot meet the escalating demand through our traditional method of production, which is to grow common species from ecotypic seed that our staff and volunteers collect sustainably in the wild throughout New England. Collection from wild populations alone cannot meet rising demand, and not without inflicting stress and damage to the wild population.

Native Plant Trust is a nationally recognized, leading organization in rare plant seed banking, with experience spanning more than 30 years. Our deep experience with seed collection and storage led the federal government to seek us out in 2015 to aid in the recovery of coastal habitats damaged by Hurricane Sandy. This project placed us in an ideal position to expand on seed-based restoration work. At Nasami Farm nursery, we have started growing five common native species in seed-increase plots, funded by Northeast Sustainable Agriculture, Research, and Education, project #FNE22-009): path rush (Juncus tenuis), boneset thoroughwort (Eupatorium perfoliatum), swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), blue vervain (Verbena hastata), coastal Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium dubium).

Creating the seed plots was the first physical step in building the Restoration Accelerator™, but the program grew out of earlier events:

• In 2015, Native Plant Trust took part in a federal project to collect seed from common native species along the Northeast coast and make the seed available to restore habitats on public lands damaged by Hurricane Sandy (2012). Our Conservation staff contributed 850 seed collections that helped to restore habitats at nearly a dozen sites.
• In 2020 we assessed our seed-production, -processing, and -storage needs for the coming years. Our seed uses include banking the seed of rare species for our seed bank (ex situ conservation) and growing common native species for contracted restoration projects and sale in our two retail shops. The assessment confronted us with a daunting uptick in need—not only for plants, but also for the seed to grow them.
• In 2022 we began discussions with other organizations in our region about seed scarcity and how to fill gaps in the supply chain. The lack of commercial availability of seeds emerged as the primary obstacle to using local ecotypic plants in habitat-restoration and pollinator projects. That year Native Plant Trust hosted a virtual symposium to devise a strategy to expand the supply of native plant seed in the Northeast. This coincided with the formation of the Northeast Seed Network, of which we are a founding member, to create a coordinated seed-increase program that includes education, training, and engagement with those who use native seed. Also in 2022, Nasami Farm received its SARE grant from to build seed-increase plots and study their efficacy as a native seed production method.
• We are actively building a regional seed partnership that will complement the seed-increase plots and storage facilities, allowing us to better forecast seed demand and encourage the growth of seed production at a regional scale. 

Native Plant Trust, Ecological Health Network, and other partners launched the Northeast Seed Network, a regional alliance of seed partnerships spanning Virginia to the Canadian Maritimes. The network provides guidance on building seed partnerships as well as standards, protocols, and best practices for seed collection, cleaning, storage, and seed-increase, like the plots at Nasami Farm.

Each partnership will be able to address the local needs of restoration projects and commercial plant production through forecasting and seed-increase programs using tailored lists of target species. The ultimate vision for the network is to foster connection and knowledge sharing among those working to improve access to diverse source-identified seeds and plants in the Northeast.

Ecoregions are large areas of similar climate where ecosystems recur in predictable patterns. The map below shows the Northeast US ecoregion, one of 15 broad ecosystems of regional extent in the US, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. An ecoregion contains many distinctive habitats characterized by their natural landforms, climate, species, and ecological communities.

Even within the same habitat, local plant populations adapt to specific conditions at the micro scale, differing genetically from one population to the next. Such genetically distinct populations of a species occupying a particular habitat are known as ecotypes. They are genetically adapted to specific environmental conditions. Maintaining the full spectrum of genetic diversity represented in ecotypes is important because changes in climate and other growing conditions might eventually favor some local adaptations over others.

When nurseries propagate plants through cuttings, cloning, or using seed collected from a small or cultivated population, they winnow out genetic diversity, rendering all the individual plants in the group susceptible to the same pests and diseases. Genetic diversity in a plant species might also ensure vital ecological relationships to particular pollinators or other animals. Plants grown from local ecotypic seed are genetically adapted to their environmental conditions, express resiliency in changing climates, and support other species that have coevolved in the landscape.