Seeds of hope: Ongoing collection efforts are essential for the future of restoration

Photo Credit

Forest Service photo by Sarah Barga

Wild seeds from multiple native plant species collected from the Great Basin.
 

Resurrection studies are a unique approach for examining how plant traits shift through time and are often made possible through seed resources found within seed banks and seed conservation programs like Seeds of Success.

A new resurrection study by Forest Service Research and Development has found differences in seed and seedling traits. By comparing outcomes from banked seed stored for 3-11 years and seed freshly collected from the same wild population source, researchers saw that the direction of trait changes varied among species when comparing populations coming from paired sites that represent unburned areas and areas experiencing wildfire. This research provides support for continued seed banking and conservation efforts as a way to preserve potentially adaptive traits as environments experience changes in weather patterns and local plant communities.

This work highlights the importance of seed conservation programs like Seeds of Success and ongoing collection efforts for focal populations that are both distributed across the environmental range of a species and revisited periodically to capture trait shifts across wild populations through time.

Raw data and R code for this resurrection study are available at the U.S. Department of Agriculture U.S. Forest Service Research Data Archive.