Ecological Restoration
Repairing damaged ecosystems
Repairing damaged ecosystems
Ecological restoration integrates science, practice, and policy to sustain biodiversity, improve resilience in a changing climate, and re-establish an ecologically healthy relationship between nature and culture. Restoring plant communities requires knowledge spanning many fields,including botany, floristics, ecology, and horticulture.
At Native Plant Trust, our Conservation and Horticulture departments work together to supply plants, seeds, and expertise for ecological restorations. The organization famously helped restore mountaintops in Acadia National Park as well as collecting seed for coastal recovery following Hurricane Sandy. Native Plant Trust’s staff are often called on by restoration practitioners to source and propagate wild, regionally adapted seed for restoration projects.
Restoration Accelerator™
In 2024, in response to a decades-long shortage of regionally adapted, regionally grown native plant seed for restorations, Native Plant Trust launched the Restoration Accelerator™ with the goal of addressing this challenge.
The Restoration Accelerator™ program aims to strengthen the regional native plant and seed supply chain through regional coordination and leveraging our deep expertise in wild seed collection, cleaning, storage and banking. We promote scaling the availability of locally adapted, source-identified seed through seed increase at Nasami Farm and with regional partners.
Our Efforts
Wild Seed Collection
Environmental change causes adaptation, resiliency and diversity to proliferate across our landscape. Collecting seed from wild plants affords restoration practitioners the ability to use the unique adaptations that occur at local scales. We are not only capturing genetic diversity in time and space, but also helping ensure the relationships that plants have forged with insects and wildlife remain intact as well.
Seed Banking
Proper storage conditions are crucial for seeds to retain viability over time. Native Plant Trust maintains a comprehensive seed bank collection that includes conservation, restoration, and production collections.
Seed Increase
We simply cannot meet the demand for native plant materials by collecting from the wild alone. Scaling the supply of genetically diverse native plant seeds relies on seed increase techniques. We can take ounces of seed (collected with genetic diversity in mind) and, over a few years, harvest pounds of seed, all while greatly reducing the pressures from wild collection on natural populations.
Seed Related Services
Restoration Accelerator™ offers consulting, seed cleaning, and storage services for third parties. We maintain a dedicated building at Nasami Farm for seed cleaning and expanded climate-controlled storage. We’re ready to serve seed producers and seed users now. We welcome requests from individuals or organizations.
Regional Coordination
By building and maintaining relationships with local producers and end users, we can better forecast industry needs and help ensure the right seeds enter the market for current and future projects.
Native Plant Sanctuaries
Our sanctuaries are home to a number of diverse natural communities–groupings of plant species occurring in a particular environment, offering a space to see how different species interact with each other and the wildlife around them to form a thriving ecosystem.
