Native seed banks help areas in Arizona recover from wildfires and climate disasters. Here's how

On a Tuesday morning, before the sun made work unbearable, employees at a local environmental nonprofit in Patagonia were planting on a fallow farm.

Surrounded by a sea of tall green grass with a backdrop of trees and mountains, the three workers bent down, digging holes in the dirt with their hands, placing plants in neat little rows.

They were employees of Borderlands Restoration Network, planting native wildflower seed. Borderlands is one of many organizations growing native plants in southern Arizona.

The need for native plants has become more urgent as wildfires continue to ravage the West, often destroying forests and other natural areas.

Ashlee Wolf, an ecologist with the Institute for Applied Ecology, said that while land can often regrow on its own, it takes time. And storms and erosion might further damage the land.

“The Southwest is unique because we are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change,” she said. “We see that with the large wildfires and the intense storms that happen with that. That adds an urgency to native seed production and restoration.”

Nurseries are feeling the increase in demand for native plants.

“I don't think there’s enough (supply),” said Bernadette Jilka, the owner of Nighthawk Natives Nursery in Tucson. “I think demand is only going to grow as more and more people move in. I think all of us nurseries feel like we can barely keep up.”

Jilka said she has customers who drive from Phoenix who complain there aren’t enough places to buy native plants in the Phoenix area. She sells native plants to other nurseries, for retail and for restoration projects. Some of those include land managers who are turning to native seed and plant programs to help revegetate natural areas.

One such program is the Borderlands Restoration Network’s Native Seed Production program in Patagonia, 18 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Borderlands works to restore local watersheds in the area and specializes in growing regionally sourced, locally adapted species of wild plants from the Upper Santa Cruz, Upper San Pedro and Willcox Play watersheds, according to Perin McNelis, the organization’s native plant program assistant manager.

“We collect seed and it’s used for different projects in those exact same watersheds,” McNelis said.

With wildfires burning across the West, McNelis sees the role of native seed programs becoming more important.

“There’s a need for restoration-quality, locally sourced seed, but on a bulk scale,” she said, adding the program is looking for ways to make bulk seed collection more affordable.

Borderlands is trying to figure out how to best farm native plants for bulk native seed collection because wild seed collection is expensive and labor intensive, McNelis said.

While collecting seed by hand can be sufficient for retail and nursery production, it is not enough for the “regional seed needs that we are seeing now in response to massive wildfires,” she said. “There’s a need for restoration quality, locally sourced seed but on a bulk scale that we have not been able to find in a way that's affordable.”

Borderlands is one of the small farmers partnering with Wolf’s team at the Institute for Applied Ecology in the Southwest Seed Partnership to grow seed for restoration projects. The Southwest Seed Partnership works to increase the availability of native seed for restoration in New Mexico and Arizona.

On the low-end, a project might require at least 1 to 2 pounds of seed per acre, Wolf said, depending on the plant species needed. In fires with many acres of high severity burns, that number could multiply quickly.

Seeding in the patches of high severity burn is most crucial to regain vegetation cover and slow erosion, she said.

The Calf Canyon/Hermit's Peak fire, a recent fire in New Mexico, had tens of thousands of acres that burned at high severity.

The smaller farms Wolf works with might collect up to 50 pounds of seed in a year.

“To address a large wildfire, we definitely need to keep expanding capacity to meet those large-scale disturbances and the seed need following those,” Wolf said.

‘Plants know better than us’

Land with plants native to the area where restoration will happen is important because plants have co-evolved with the surrounding fauna and pollinators, providing food throughout their life cycles and migratory routes, McNelis said.

Native plants have evolved to the specific precipitation patterns, temperature and elevation, McNelis reiterated.

When irrigation or constant monitoring is not possible — like in a garden — using seeds adapted to the conditions of the area is the best way to ensure the plants’ survival.

“They are ideally from the same watershed with similar precipitation patterns, similar elevation,” she said.

Often, the same species of plant can be found in different states across the country, she said, but just because they are the same does not mean they will do well in every climate.

“The grasses sourced from here are going to likely do better than the ones brought in from somewhere far away, even if the species is the same,” McNelis said. “There’s a lot of plasticity within a species that allows it to adapt to very localized conditions.”

The plants in each area have been around much longer than European settlers, she said.

“Plants know better than us,” she said.

Borderlands grows as need for native seeds increases

Borderlands has expanded its fields and the size of its seed-collection site over the last several years. The nonprofit’s seed collections used to be stored in the backhouse of a generous volunteer. As its collections and field grow-outs increased, it eventually upgraded to a 3,000-square-foot barn.

In the barn, a trailer-turned-walk-in-cooler stores the seed collection. The barn also includes seed drying and cleaning equipment.

Borderlands is growing native plants for commercial sales, but it hopes to expand the field for seed needed for larger restoration efforts. It farms on 1.25 acres of land on an abandoned agricultural field.

So while it learns to grow seed in bulk, it also addresses the problem of unused abandoned farms.

There has been a lot of effort to grow wild native plants in abandoned agricultural fields, McNelis said, but projects often fail because there is not continued upkeep.

However, once plants are established, they can “exist on their own with very little input,” she said.

Scars remain: Survivors seek peace 20 years after Rodeo-Chediski Fire

McNelis hypothesized that native seed programs have become more prominent in southern Arizona because as the state has experienced the full spectrum of climate-related ecological crises, groups are responding to the challenges.

Borderlands does cross-border work with groups in Sonora, Mexico, where there is a big interest in starting seed programs. McNelis has also had groups attend Borderlands workshops, wanting to learn how to start seed banks.

She hopes that the native seed and plant groups in Arizona become a model to reproduce anywhere on a local level, where every “watershed has its own program” to address local problems, she said.

That would be more beneficial than one group parachuting in to solve the issues and leaving, leading to a lack of long-term maintenance and stewardship of the projects, she said.

Coverage of southern Arizona on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is funded by the nonprofit Report for America in association with The Republic.

Reach the reporter at [email protected].

Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How native seed banks help areas in Arizona recover after wildfires