At Home - Ecological Restorations - At Scale
Imagining the Tallamy approach projected onto the earth. Where do the native plants used in his approach come from? Current propagation and distribution mechanisms risk every installation of a species having the same genetic genotype from a non-local region. Is it possible to imagine a model that doesn't rely on big-box retailers supplying the increasing number of gardeners clamoring for native plants?
When I think about the holding places of this regions local genotypes I think about the following large organizations...
Bowyer Farm
Cardinal Conservancy
Cincinnati Nature Center
Cincinnati Parks
Great Parks
Hillside Trust
Little Miami Conservancy
Western Wildlife Corridor
There are many others, but these organizations represent large repositories of the most localized, naturally occurring genotypes that my region has left. These aren't the ONLY repositories. There are many colonies existing on smaller, decentralized, privately owned land. Land that is still at risk of development by current or future owners. There is nothing preventing these private land-owners from offering collections of genotypes from these decentralized locations. In fact, decentralized offerings of local genotypes installed by decentralized gardeners would be preferable to "native" species supplied by big-box retailers. What's been missing has been the mechanism that allows this to happen.
I imagine four pieces involved in assembling this mechanism.
1) Genetic Material Suppliers
In this conceptual model, the suppliers could be any private landowner offering seeds, cuttings, or individual plants from their own property. In my case, I'm offering genetic material from my Britton Woods project. An observation of the parent colony would be provided for each species offered to propagators, distributors or straight to installers. If you take my Northern Spicebush offering as an example, it is listed as being part of the Britton Woods project and is also listed as a species being offered to others via the Seed Conservancy of Cincinnati project.
2) Propagators
Propagators who request Northern Spicebush seeds being offered by the Britton Woods project would add a qr code to any plants grown from those seeds.
These propagators would be most interested in following the Seed Conservancy of Cincinnati project. They'd be interested in this because the "Genetic Material Suppliers" are offering them access to local genotypes whose location can be publicly revealed to the recipients of the plants being propagated. As it stands today, when you ask propagators and distributors about the provenance of their plants, you tend to get somewhat vague answers.
3) Distributors
A qr code on the black plastic pot that the plant is sold in would direct the recipient to an iNat observation of a wild colony from which the child plant descends. A QR code exactly like the one above. Try it... point your phone camera at it and click... it should take you to my wild, parent colony observation from which seeds were collected at Britton Woods.
4) Installers
A recipient of a Britton Woods spicebush would make a "casual" observation of the installed plant after receiving it from a distributor. In my case, I'm installing Britton Woods plants at my Casual Woodland Garden project here at home. I set a new observation field for each of the casual plantings that have come from Britton Woods. This is important because in most cases the genetic material suppliers and the installers won't know each other. It's a way for the installers to acknowledge the generous gift of a local genotype from decentralized private property owners. In time, some of these private property owners might come to be viewed as "farmers" of native species whose "farms" benefit from preferential cauv tax treatment (but this is not up to me!). This preferential tax treatment might further incentivize private landowners to manage invasives and encourage natives. If you consider one of the "casual" observations of spicebush planted in my Casual Woodland Garden, a new "observation field" has been set to "Britton Woods".
Clicking the header for this new observation field results in a pop-up where the user can select "Observations with this field and value". Selecting this will display a list of all the installations of plants descended from Britton Woods parent colonies. This growing list would allow the suppliers to observe their genotypes re-wilding the region.
Although there are four pieces required to assemble this puzzle, it's important to recognize the platform that allows it to happen. The platform is what enables the pieces of the puzzle to fit together. In this moment, iNaturalist has the "mind share" and the largest network of active users. If another platform materializes in the future and builds similar "mind share" and engagement, this same model could be offered there. The model is agnostic of platform but requires observations by ordinary citizen suppliers and ordinary citizen installers.
The software exists to associate wild parent colonies with cultivated children, we just need to put the puzzle together. Many suppliers supplying many installers while preserving provenance data from end to end.
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The reason it scales is that the propagators would be visiting a great many supplier locations to decide what offerings they'd like to propagate. And the distributors would be interacting with a great many installers while passing along the provenance data for each casual observation of the installed plant. Propagators would help suppliers understand how to make wild observations on iNat. Distributors would help installers understand how to make casual / cultivated observations on iNat that link back to the suppliers parent colony.
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