Seed Menus: An integrated decision‐support framework for native plant restoration in the Mojave Desert

Abstract

The combination of ecosystem stressors, rapid climate change, and increasing landscape-scale development has necessitated active restoration across large tracts of disturbed habitats in the arid southwestern United States. In this context, programmatic directives such as the National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration have increasingly emphasized improved restoration practices that promote resilient, diverse plant communities, and enhance native seed reserves. While decision-support tools have been implemented to support genetic diversity by guiding seed transfer decisions based on patterns in local adaptation, less emphasis has been placed on identifying priority seed mixes composed of native species assemblages. Well-designed seed mixes can provide foundational ecosystem services including resilience to disturbance, resistance to invasive species, plant canopy structure to facilitate natural seedling recruitment, and habitat to support wildlife and pollinator communities. Drawing from a newly developed dataset of species distribution models for priority native plant taxa in the Mojave Desert, we created a novel decision support tool by pairing spatial predictions of species habitat with a database of key species traits including life history, flowering characteristics, pollinator relationships, and propagation methods. This publicly available web application, Mojave Seed Menus, helps restoration practitioners generate customized seed mixes for native plant restoration in the Mojave Desert based on project locations. Our application forms part of an integrated Mojave Desert restoration program designed to help practitioners identify species to include in local seed mixes and nursery stock development while accounting for local adaptation by identifying appropriate seed source locations from key restoration species.

Harnessing landscape genomics to identify future climate resilient genotypes in a desert annual

“…it would not be feasible to design seed collection efforts around so many separate areas). For this reason, we derive climate‐based seed transfer zones (clusters) along with an NDVI amplitude layer for site‐specific evaluations of surface condition within each climate zone (Shryock et al., 2020a).…”

Functional traits are used in restoration practice: a response to Merchant et al. (2022)

“…Indeed, popular tools developed for practitioners often accommodate this approach. The Mojave Seed Menu (Shryock et al 2022), for example, is an online plant materials selection tool that allows users to use functional objectives to generate restoration seed mixes. This shift toward restoration of ecosystem functions and services requires that practitioners use traits to meet these goals, albeit without always adopting trait-based terminology or quantifying all traits used.…”

A recruitment niche framework for improving seed‐based restoration

“…Recent efforts to quantify the environmental niche of adult plants in restoration demonstrate how a standard approach to niche characterization (in this case, based on species' geographic distributions) enables community‐level planning in SBR (e.g. developing “seed menus” of climate‐ready species for restoration, Shryock et al 2022). Still, these efforts have not directly considered species' establishment barriers—a critical gap for seed‐based restoration, since adult occurrence is not always a precise or useful indicator of recruitment suitability (e.g.…”