[PCA] ARTICLE: A cup full of seeds equals big success

De Angelis, Patricia patricia_deangelis at fws.gov
Thu Nov 9 14:19:53 CST 2017


 *A cup full of seeds equals big success: Federal land managers in Nevada
are optimistic that native seeds collected will eventually translate into
warehouses full of locally adapted seed*

By Dan Hottle
November 8, 2017

Marcus Tamura and Lauren Gonce, two Great Basin Institute interns and Seeds
of Success program crewmembers, may be the only people on the planet who
spent their entire summer scouring more than 4,500 miles of Nevada’s rugged
outback to get their hands on the precious seed of native plants with names
like hoary tansyaster.

“Unfortunately we don’t have airplanes and drones and teams of hundreds of
people on the ground helping us search for these kinds of plants,” said
Tamura, who traveled up from the San Francisco Bay area. “So Lauren and I
drove about 1,500 miles each week looking for 12 different species that we
hoped we could find growing where we could spot them from our truck.”

After several hours of driving, searching, walking, bending and picking
through acres of rocky, arid land at the end of each arduous day, the two
interns considered themselves lucky if they had collected enough seed from
native Nevada plants to be able to fill a coffee cup.

The specific seed species being targeted by collection crews are recognized
by western botanists and ecologists as part of the foundation of healthy
native plant communities throughout the Great Basin. If enough native seeds
are collected, they can be used in large-scale restoration efforts to help
increase resilience against invasive species and slow  wildfire cycles that
imperil the vital sagebrush ecosystem.

“Finding large enough native plant communities from which to collect seed
from a vast landscape across Nevada is a slow, painstaking process,” said
Sarah Kulpa, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service botanist based in Reno. “The
seed collected from those populations can be used for research and
development or given to commercial growers so that land managers will be
able to start restoring vegetation and wildlife habitat lost in wildfires
with the seed from our native plants.”

Full story:
https://www.fws.gov/cno/newsroom/featured/2017/seeds_of_success/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/native-plants_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20171109/11c926ec/attachment.html>


More information about the native-plants mailing list