How Warm Is Your Water? Collaborating to Identify Climate-adapted Plant Materials for Habitat Restoration and Water Quality Projects
Start Date
4-4-2023 2:20 PM
End Date
4-4-2023 2:29 PM
Abstract
Over the last two decades, natural resource conservation partners in the Tualatin basin have utilized locally-sourced native plant materials to accomplish a variety of water quality and habitat enhancement objectives throughout the basin. To date, the selection of plant materials has been based on local historical reference sites for a variety of different plant communities (i.e., wetlands, riparian forest, and upland forest), which ensures that the materials selected are appropriate for the Tualatin basin.
Unfortunately, climate change disrupts this management paradigm. Restoration projects need to be resilient to environmental changes over long time scales. Climate change scenarios indicate that our restoration sites will experience warmer and drier conditions in the future where locally-sourced plant materials may not meet restoration objectives.
To address these challenges, Clean Water Services, the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District and the Institute for Applied Ecology have partnered to develop and implement a climate-adapted native plant materials strategy. The strategy seeks to enhance genetic and species diversity in restoration projects by sourcing a portion of our plant material from areas expected to be future climate analogues for the Tualatin basin, either using multiple seed sources within a species (assisted gene flow) or new species all together (assisted migration). I will discuss activities to date that include; the identification of and plant community surveys at climate analogue sites, species selection, seed collection and design for a long-term common garden experiment to identify promising plant materials for future restoration projects.
Subjects
Climate Change, Habitat restoration, Plant ecology
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/40485
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
How Warm Is Your Water? Collaborating to Identify Climate-adapted Plant Materials for Habitat Restoration and Water Quality Projects
Over the last two decades, natural resource conservation partners in the Tualatin basin have utilized locally-sourced native plant materials to accomplish a variety of water quality and habitat enhancement objectives throughout the basin. To date, the selection of plant materials has been based on local historical reference sites for a variety of different plant communities (i.e., wetlands, riparian forest, and upland forest), which ensures that the materials selected are appropriate for the Tualatin basin.
Unfortunately, climate change disrupts this management paradigm. Restoration projects need to be resilient to environmental changes over long time scales. Climate change scenarios indicate that our restoration sites will experience warmer and drier conditions in the future where locally-sourced plant materials may not meet restoration objectives.
To address these challenges, Clean Water Services, the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District and the Institute for Applied Ecology have partnered to develop and implement a climate-adapted native plant materials strategy. The strategy seeks to enhance genetic and species diversity in restoration projects by sourcing a portion of our plant material from areas expected to be future climate analogues for the Tualatin basin, either using multiple seed sources within a species (assisted gene flow) or new species all together (assisted migration). I will discuss activities to date that include; the identification of and plant community surveys at climate analogue sites, species selection, seed collection and design for a long-term common garden experiment to identify promising plant materials for future restoration projects.