Seeds of Change

[WEB APP] A predictive seed provenancing tool for ecological restoration.

Seeds of Change is a decision support tool for ecological restoration. It identifies areas in California that may be suitable for seed collection or planting, by analyzing spatial data on climate change, soil characteristics, species distributions, and adaptive neighborhoods. I developed this Shiny app as part of a partnership with folks at the National Park Service, with funding from the Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity, and hosting support from the Berkeley Museums of Natural History.

This is by no means the first tool out there to address this need, including some great seed provenancing apps like the Seedlot Selection Tool. But our version does include some novel features that we hope will help advance the utility for managers:

• It uses data on soil in addition to climate, a step toward addressing an unmet need to account for local adaptation to different soil types.
• It integrates species distribution maps for every species of native plant within California, giving restoration managers key context for planting and collection efforts.
• It includes past and future climate variables that are ecologically important in mediterranean-type ecosystems, such as climatic water deficit and actual evapotranspiration.
• It uses a new spatial smoothing approach that we developed to more realistically model how gene flow among sites might affect their adaptive evolution.
• It includes environment-matching settings focused on predictive provenancing, as well as environment-clustering settings focused on admixture provenancing and seed banking.

We’re excited to have the app up and running and have resource managers at the NPS and other organizations using it to help guide restoration efforts. We’re working on a journal article describing the methods, so keep an eye out for that as well.