This article originally appeared in the CNPS 2023-24 Annual Report.
How do you protect California’s biodiversity now and for a changing future? You start with seeds.
Just ask Steve Buckley, a career botanist and ecologist who now leads the National Park Service’s vegetation ecology program in Northern California. For 20 years, Steve has dedicated his career to understanding how best to restore lands and ecosystems using native seeds. While the demand for seeds in restoration projects has surged, finding enough of the right seeds—those that are ecologically suited for specific habitats—has become increasingly challenging for agencies like the National Park Service. As California’s parklands and wild areas suffer the impacts of climate change, including more frequent and severe wildfires, the need for native seeds has never been more critical.
“It’s hard to keep pace with millions of acres of wildfires and 300 years of encroaching invasive plant species,” Steve explains. “But without adequate, appropriate native seed material, we lose the landscapes that characterize our state. We lose what makes California special.”
To meet this moment, Steve was part of the team of partners who developed the California Native Seed Strategy for Ecological Restoration. Based on the National Seed Strategy, the California strategy provides a comprehensive roadmap for the future of native seeds and ecological restoration, ensuring that land managers across the state can plant the right seed, in the right place, at the right time. Through a collaboration of agencies, environmental organizations, and Tribal knowledge, Steve and partners have produced a strategy that is already fostering regional working groups across the state to create innovative native seed solutions, such as community seed banks and seed exchange networks.
As the coordinating partner of the strategy, the California Native Plant Society is working to bring experts like Steve together to share experiences and build connections that enhance California’s native seed supply. Made possible through a cooperative agreement with the Bureau of Land Management’s Plant Conservation Program, the California Native Seed Strategy represents a critical step in CNPS’s commitment to ecologically based land stewardship.
With the strategy now complete, the real work of building future solutions can begin. This is the part that fills Steve with hope:
“It’s through collaboration that we can see ourselves as part of the solution.”
Despite the many challenges ahead, Steve and his partners envision a future where native seeds are central to California’s stewardship efforts and to restoring our balance with nature.
