Is the Use of Regionally Sourced Plant Material a Valid Requirement for Plants in a Climate Change Scenario?

Here in Maryland, as in many states, the assembly of a restoration planting plan often requires the explicit statement: "All plant material is to be sourced from (name physiographic province of the state) region of (name a term that describes five states including yours)."  The idea, and it is a noble one, is to ensure that the New York Finger Lakes wetland you are building is populated by plant material that was not sourced from Washington state, which could cause a dilution of high quality genetics from the regionally appropriate plants.   One of the first (academic or regulatory) problems of this rule is that it is only applied to live plant material, and not to conservation seed mixes, even though those seed mixes contain seeds for perennial native plants.  Oops.

But there's a much larger problem with focusing on New York-bred plants for New York projects.  Take a look below.

The vast majority of the country should experience a 5 to 7 degree increase in mean temperature.  Now, mean temperatures are deceiving because it's actually the minimum temperatures that impact things like growing seasons, insect overwintering mortality, and seed viability.  But let's ignore that, or, rather than ignoring it, let's take a look at the USDA growing season map, which is dictated by lowest temperatures, not mean temperatures.

You gardeners may recall that just a year ago, USDA revised its plant zone map based upon climate change data that is already rolling in.   How might a 5 degree change in the next 40 years impact this map further?  Well, let's look at Maryland, largely a Zone 7a state (0-5 degrees - we haven't seen temperatures that low in a decade).  An increase of 5 to 7 degrees could place Maryland in Zone 8a, a solid subtropical coastal growing zone.   That's a lot of change in a short amount of time.  Maryland ecosystems could quite feasibly start acting like South Carolina ecosystems.  Which brings us back to the topic of regional plant genetics.

If I'm planting an emergent wetland where even perennial plants will succumb after less than 10 years, it seems to make great sense to utilize the most locally native plant genetics possible.  But what about planting an oak swamp?  An alder thicket?  An upland hickory forest stand?  What about plants that quite conceivably could still be alive as the climate changes drastically over the next 40 years?  

For long-lived plants used in forestry and restoration work, I propose abandoning the "regional plant genetics" preferences and requirements, and instead, for us to begin looking to our south to find strong genetics for plants that are tolerant of the stresses that climate change is likely to bring us - increased flooding, increased drought, unpredictability of precipitation, and warmer minimum temperatures.   In Maryland, for example, the Shumard Red Oak exists in the wild in our southernmost county.  Yet, it's never mentioned in conversations about forestry, forest habitat management, or habitat restoration because "It's Not Native."  I think this is foolish, and currently there are 200 Shumard acorns from northern North Carolina now hardening in my basement refrigerator, to be used on habitat restoration sites.

"This is preposterous!" you might say.  An alternate example with a different story ending is the Sugar Maple.  Most foresters and landscape architects stopped planting sugar maples in the Mid-Atlantic in the early 2000s because the summer droughts were killing huge numbers of trees.   Yet, our DNR Forestry Division still refers to Sugar Maple as a "Maryland Native Tree" - providing it to citizens to plant on their property!

Here's what's going on with the Sugar Maple:

The species is predicted to lose over 90% of its range.  It's already happening.  Why - as a professional community - can't we agree to change and accept new conditions around us?

So when you're considering a list of long-lived trees for a forestry, landscaping, or habitat restoration site, there's no need to stick to "the standards" for native plants in your area.   Please plan ahead, and perhaps your innovation to prepare habitat for climate change will be noted as part of your legacy.   It's certainly better than being known as "the idiot who planted all these dead sugar maples 40 years ago."

Is 150 Years of Ecological Research Enough?

For over 100 years, humans have known that the exhaust from fossil fuel burning causes low-altitude air pollution, which makes workers and city dwellers sick.  For 150 years, we've known that cholera and other diseases are carried by water that is untreated and mismanaged. For 1,000 years, we've understood the nature of human-to-human contagions, their propagation in nature, and their utility on the world's battlefields. The use of pesticides goes back at least to the Roman rule of France.  Which has been over for awhile.

These issues continue to pose significant problems for the future of our species, and yet, our inability or unwillingness to tackle them have absolutely nothing to do with a lack of science, or inability to define the problem and the potential solutions.

So, as a natural resource manager, excuse me if I grow tired of hearing that this government agency (career position, with pension) or that university researcher (tenured, with pension) are not ready to proceed with environmental cleanups because there's no guarantee that conventional or existing, innovative restoration techniques may or may not be more effective and efficient than techniques that could perhaps be developed 50 or 100 years from now.   And yet, from some quarters within the highly environmentally aware community, that's exactly the meme that's being pushed from highly comfortable offices.

Obviously, there are fields in which continued - if not accelerated - research and research funding are critical.   Like cancer and genome research.  Those are good ones.

About five years ago, I was invited to do a presentation to a group of EPA scientists on the topic of ecological restoration efficiency.  They seemed pleased enough to listen to what I had to say, but as a group, were extraordinarily concerned with the possibility that, "What if 10 years from now, we find out that we could have been doing it a smarter way, all along?"  Which led to a strong head-nodding agreement that, "We should wait, let's not do anything now."

If you search through ecology blogs, as I occasionally do, there's a wealth of people writing about their research on this wolf, or that lichen, or that endangered fern.   I'd never claim that those are not worthy undertakings for a career in ecology or forest management or whatever.

But I can't imagine that if the Ogallala Aquifer runs dry, as predicted, in 12-20 years, it will matter.  Or that if our human population does in fact hit 12 billion, that it will matter.  Or that if global food production continues to decrease 0.5% annually, that it will matter.  Or that if China and India - fully making up 50% of the entire world's population - decide to go to war, that any of it will matter.

What will matter then is water, soil, and the food that comes from them.  Whether we beat those odds will be greatly impacted by what we do in the next decade to protect headwaters, protect groundwater, enhance food production (but not at the expense of virgin erodible soils/habitats), protect and enhance sustainable fisheries, and protect and enhance soils.   And by what we "do," I don't mean what we research.  I mean "what work gets accomplished."  Upgrading sewer plants.  Water treatment.  Agricultural targeting (both lands to protect against agriculture, and lands to protect FOR agriculture).  Getting it done.   Yes, we'll find out in 20 years that we can be doing it more efficiently.   That should be a triumph in our process - not the starting point for getting something done.

The only way I could answer those career bureaucrat scientists several years ago was with total honesty.  I told them that if we don't start today, it won't matter.  All those efficiencies we hope to discover in the coming decades will be lost because from 1970 to 2030, we did nothing, while knowing full well that the future of our species depended on sustainable water, soil, and food.   We know so much about the dynamics of water, soil, air, and wildlife.  In some cases, the dynamic nature of systems leads us back to the same point - entropy does, and must, exist.  And as a result, there will be failures.  Aqueducts designed by the Romans failed routinely.    Amsterdam's dike system has been built-and-rebuilt several times over.  Stream restoration projects designed in 1930, 1960, 1990, and 2010 have failed.   But most do not.   And from those efforts that fail, we learn much. 

So what will you do? If you're a researcher, when will you be confident in stating that, "this application of theory to field methods should work, most of the time."  If you're an agency biologist, when will you take the authority given to you by your agency and say, "Go ahead with this project.  It's far better than doing nothing."  Or will you say, once again, "more research is needed."