State Botanical Garden at UGA receives $1.6 million federal grant for native seed project

An ongoing federally-funded project is dedicated to creating a native seed network for habitat restoration following natural disasters in Georgia.

“This is fairly new to the southeast,” said Zach Wood, grasslands coordinator, State Botanical Garden of Georgia at the University of Georgia. “The goal of the seed network is to collect seeds from the wild and store them. At some point down the road if we need them, we can access them.”

The State Botanical Garden of Georgia at the University of Georgia received $1.6 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to move the project forward.

Wood said the funding for the network came from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Fire Prevention and Response Program.

“We're going to start preparing for all sorts of natural disasters,” he said. “If something did happen, we will have material on hand if we need it.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, and the U.S. The Department of Agriculture is also involved.

“Another goal of seed networks is to collect seeds from the wild and then put them into production,” said Wood. “That way they can be purchased and used for large scale restoration projects. The reason why they're usually called networks is because different organizations, governmental, NGO, private, everyone kind of working together towards this common goal.”

Wood said partnering with other organizations is key to the success of the seed network.

“We're also partnering with the U.S. Forest Service as well as the US Forest Service National seed Lab, which is located in Macon,” he said. “We're also partnering with the US Department of Agriculture. The State Botanical Garden of Georgia, is also part of the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance.It’s a network of people focused on plant conservation of more rare, threatened and endangered species in Georgia.”

The collected seeds of native plants provide green infrastructure that is critical for emergency preparedness, food security and combat symptoms of natural disasters such as large storms, floods and fire.

“We’re working with private landowners and farmers,” said Wood. “We just received the funding in the past couple of months. We're circling back around and having conversations with everyone, planning for the upcoming year.”

Native plant species on the list:

• Rattlesnake Master
• Cardinal Flower
• Blue mistlower
• Little Bluestem
• Butterfly Milkweed

Wood said when it comes to collecting plant material there are ethical standards that must be followed.

“We're following the National Seed Strategy, which is a federal strategy that was worked up several years ago,” said Wood. “Generally, we're targeting species based on several criteria. One, we need to be able to find them in large populations. Since we collect from the wild we never collect more than 20% of the population.”

Wood said seeds also have to meet a specific criteria.

“We want seeds that are easy to clean,” he said. “We have to collect the seeds and clean them so that they can be stored properly. We also look for seeds that are easy to grow.”

Joseph Kirsch, fish and wildlife biologist, for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said with the increase in natural disasters associated with climate change, projects like this are more of a priority.

“The need has always existed in the conservation field,” said Kirsch. “Especially since we’ve learned through science that if you use plant materials not locally adapted to the environment, they typically have problems reestablishing a functional ecosystem. When we have increased frequencies of wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, things of that sort, we're starting to realize that sometimes there's a need to restore larger swaths of land.”

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Erica Van Buren is the climate change reporter for The Augusta Chronicle, part of the USA TODAY Network. Connect with her at EVanBuren@gannett.com or on X: @EricaVanBuren32.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: State Botanical Garden at UGA receives $1.6 million federal grant for native seed project