MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Scientists say regions recovering from wildfires, drought and floods need more native seed plants, but there's a national shortage of seeds. So scientists are collecting and sharing them. Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco with the climate news site Grist and member station WBEZ has this report.
JUANPABLO RAMIREZ-FRANCO, BYLINE: The Chicago Botanic Garden is a 385-acre complex with prairies and interconnected greenhouses, where more than 100,000 plants sprout each year. It's also home to at least 46 million seeds stored in the garden's conservation science center. On this day, that's where volunteer Marty Landorf sits hunched over a lab table.
What are you looking at here?
MARTY LANDORF: These are rudbeckia, black-eyed Susan.
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: Landorf crumbles dried plants between her hands, trying to break through the chaff to free up some seeds to store inside the seed bank.
Can you pull one of them out?
LANDORF: Yeah. There are these little black things.
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: The really puny ones, huh?
LANDORF: Oh, they're not as small as some of the ones we've seen. Oh, we had some giant ones that we were looking at a little bit earlier but...
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: These black-eyed Susan seeds are native to the Midwest. Like other notable Midwestern flowers, like the coneflower or the milkweed, these plant species evolved over thousands of years to thrive and sustain the region's ecosystems. That makes them indispensable for restoration efforts of the region's remaining prairies, wetlands and woodlands that have been stressed by extreme weather induced by climate change. Andrea Kramer, the Chicago Botanic Garden's director of conservation, says there is a vast shortage of native seed in the Midwest. The Midwest Native Seed Network, a coalition of restoration ecologists, land managers and seed growers, conducted a survey last year.
ANDREA KRAMER: They identified 501 species that they can't get access either to the species at all, or it's too expensive, or they can't get access to seed that is from within their even general region.
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: The botanic garden helped launch the seed network two years ago to try to fix the problem as a first step in shoring up the region's fragile seed supply.
KRAMER: But it's all just not as connected as it could be and as it needs to be in order to really address these really big gaps in native seed capacity that are limiting our ability to do this work.
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: The network is trying to figure out which plant species are most in demand, where they can thrive, and what it'll take to get them in the ground. The botanic garden's chief scientist, Kay Havens, says that's a struggle across the country.
KAY HAVENS: It doesn't matter, you know, if you're here in the Chicago region and you're trying to restore our forest preserves or if you're in the intermountain West and trying to restore large landscapes after fire. Appropriate native seed just isn't available in the quantities needed.
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: Havens contributed to a national assessment in 2023 about the need for native seeds that found that it would take a huge coordinated effort to address demand. During the Biden administration, millions of dollars were dedicated to build a first-of-its-kind national bank for native seeds. But after President Trump's reelection, the project was put on the back burner. Conservation Director Kramer says that regional efforts to save seeds are more important than ever.
KRAMER: In 10 years, if we do the same survey, I want them to say, we have access to all the seed we need.
RAMIREZ-FRANCO: Then she says they can worry about the next challenge climate change has in store.
For NPR News, I'm Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMAPEA'S "STRANGE SEED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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