Ecological restoration projects often require thousands of seeds or seedlings. But there’s another approach that’s gaining momentum, especially on Tribal lands: introducing water or fire to a landscape and then letting long-buried seeds come back to life. Portland-based freelance journalist Josephine Woolington wrote about this recently for High Country News and joins us with more details.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Ecological restoration projects say turning farmland back into a prairie or a wetland often requires a lot of active management and things like planting tens of thousands of seeds or seedlings. But there is another approach that’s gaining some momentum, especially on tribal land: introducing water or fire back to a landscape and then letting long-buried seeds come back to life on their own. In other words, letting nature take its course. Author and freelance writer Josephine Woolington wrote about this for High Country News and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Josephine Woolington: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: You started your recent article with the story of a third-generation Willamette Valley farmer named Sam Lea. What did he do 24 years ago?
Woolington: Sam lives on a property that is on a lake bed of a former lake called Lake Labish, just north of Salem. He farmed onions for many decades and the business just became less profitable for him. And he told me he had always wondered what the natural landscape would have looked like. And he ended up working with Ducks Unlimited, the NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service], got a conservation easement, so he got money to turn his property back into wetlands. And he essentially dug up a few ponds and largely left the land alone. He planted a few trees on the perimeter. Just about five years ago, wapato, which is a first food for Indigenous peoples in the Northwest, came back on its own and it was unseeded. He didn’t plant anything.
Miller: So what’s the theory about what happened?
Woolington: He doesn’t know for sure. But he thinks that the wapato seeds might have been brought in by birds. There is wapato not too far away at a place called Wapato Lake. It can be found within the valley and slow moving water. But another theory is that once water returns to wetlands, buried tubers under the ground, maybe like a foot or an arm’s length under the ground, can be reawakened. And these tubers may have been underneath the ground for decades since the lake was drained in the early 1900s.
Miller: So three generations of farmers growing onions or whatever, and they’re just lying dormant there, not dead, just waiting for the right time to sprout again. Was that Sam Lea’s plan 24 years ago? I mean, was this an experiment? Was it an accident? Was it just good luck?
Woolington: He really had no idea what to expect. He went into it, I think, with an open mind. The willows were the first to return. They came back in such great abundance that he’s actually had to remove some. And he thinks the seeds flew in from the nearby Willamette. And he didn’t actually know what wapato was, so he used a phone app to identify it. It has a distinct shaped leaf like an arrowhead. And he had no idea about its potential to regrow.
Miller: I want to turn to another example. What did you learn about Grand Ronde efforts on land that used to be large expanses of oak savannah?
Woolington: The Grand Ronde has been working on reacquiring plots of land within the Willamette Valley to restore prairies. And they reacquired one site near Baskett Slough, west of Salem, and they have been working on milling, pulling the invasive grasses that create really thick thatch layers. And so once the restoration ecologist started clearing some space, these lupines started popping up and she thinks that they are the federally threatened Kincaid’s Lupine. And again, nothing was seeded. With lupines, they’re interesting because they’re part of the pea family and plants within that family have a really hard seed coat; it’s like a ceramic shell that can survive decades. Scotch broom, which is a pretty well known invasive, is within that family as well.
Miller: That yellow flowering plant, it’s maybe pretty, unless you realize that it shouldn’t be there.
Woolington: Right. Scotch broom can live up to 80 years in the seed bank. But it’s kind of interesting because so much of the science has been focused on the invasive plants that we scientists actually don’t know how long native plants can survive. But again, it could be that those lupines were down in the soil for years, decades, just kind of waiting for a little bit of sunlight and some water.
Miller: How much are invasive species an ongoing issue for the version of restoration that you’re talking about? You talked about mowing it once and then at a certain point these lupines came up. But isn’t it possible that scotch broom, after just generations of scotch broom would come up? I mean, when invasive species have taken over landscapes, how big a challenge is that, when you want a couple little seeds down there to sprout?
Woolington: Of course, I’m not in college, so I’m not actively doing restoration. But from what people have told me, it’s a huge issue, it’s a huge task. And I think the key is patience and to not expect immediately that all the scotch broom is gone. It’s gonna be decades. You know, one tribal environmental program manager with the Stillaguamish tribe told me it took 150 years to get to this point. It’s going to take a long time, a relationship to remove those invasive species, but even just a little bit of room can get native plants a foot in the door. So that might be enough to help them re-establish and continue to work on that landscape.
Miller: Is that time frame difference that you’re talking about, one of the issues at the heart of it…to the extent that there’s a disagreement between more traditional, maybe more western ecological restoration, which says, let’s do this now. Let’s do this with this federal grant in three to five years as opposed to, let’s think about the next 100 years of slowly bringing this place back. I mean, is the time one of the biggest differences?
Woolington: Yeah, I would say so. That’s one of the most striking contrasts that I found talking to non-native ecologists versus Native ecologists, is the Native ecologists really speak to that relationship, that patience that’s needed. Plants regrow in stages. It’s not immediate old growth in five years. I think a lot of the urge to do restoration quickly reflects that instant gratification culture that we find ourselves in. And it’s also, as you mentioned, grants are three to five years, but the agencies - and often it’s public agencies that are giving these grants out - they want certainty. And so if you say we’re gonna remove the invasives and see what happens, that might not satisfy people who are giving out money. They might want more of a, well, what are you actually gonna do? How are you going to get it?
Miller: What’s the proof that you spent this money well?
Woolington: Right.
Miller: I want to turn to an estuary. Can you tell us the story of what’s now called “zis a ba”?
Woolington: Zis a ba is a site in the Stillaguamish Estuary, which is just north of Everett in Northwest Washington on Puget Sound. The Stillaguamish Tribe started restoring it in 2017. It was previously a spinach farm, there were a few other crops that grew there, wheat. It’s been levied off from Puget Sound, meaning that the tide hasn’t flooded the site for over 150 years or so, 140 years. The tribe worked with a local scientist who had been studying Puget Sound estuaries for decades. And he was really interested by all the channels that he found in some of the remnant estuaries that had never been developed.
At zis a ba, they noticed that there was such a thick clay layer once they started work on that property and he predicted that we need to actually excavate these channels ourselves, and we can’t wait for water to do the work for us. Because water would eventually in time, create channels, but it would take decades, maybe over 100 years. So they went in, and from his mathematical model, created the right amount of tidal channels that then allowed the Puget Sound to come in and bring the seeds and vegetate the marsh naturally. When there’s enough tidal channels, the water spreads over a more textured surface and kind of slows the tides down a bit. Whereas, if you put native seeds down without excavating, the scientist who I’m talking about - Greg Hood - theorizes that the tides will just wash the seeds away.
Miller: That’s a helpful example, because it shows that it’s not as simple as just, walk away and let the buried seeds do their work, or put some seeds down and walk away. There is a more complex interplay between preparing the land in some way, maybe repairing the land in some way and walking away. What are other examples of what people who practice this version of natural restoration do to make the natural restoration more likely to work?
Woolington: I think that’s a good point, that sometimes natural regeneration is called passive restoration, which I think is not a great way to think about it because it isn’t as simple as you just said - bring water back on a site and then walk away. Another example is these wetlands along Toppenish Creek that the Yakama Nation worked to restore, and they spent 15 years researching the cultural, the geological history, the hydrology of the site, and understanding how water once flowed through the floodplain historically. And once they got a sense of historically, what it looked like, then they were able to recreate what the floodplain would have been like. So they created rock structures that mimicked beaver dams. They also acquired a lot of the water rights along the creek. So instead of using those rights for crops and agriculture, they used the water to flood the site as it naturally would flood in the spring when snow melt comes down and would have covered the floodplains. And so they would then dwindle the water to dry out the wetlands completely in summer, because that would have been the natural flow of water.
Whereas now, with irrigated agriculture, it’s kind of the opposite. We catch all the spring runoff and then we slowly release it to farms in the summer. Yakama’s example proves that it’s not passive, you have to actively go in and work with the landscape and create that relationship. And they also talk about, it’s a relationship to be maintained in perpetuity. It’s not like we’re done with our restoration project. They’re still working on it. They still control the water levels, they burn to control invasive plants as well.
Miller: We talked with Fisheries Department director from the Yurok Tribe, Barry McCovey Jr. a couple of times recently about the largest dam removal project in the world. And what he said was fascinating that, as soon as the dam started coming down, even before then, they’ve been planting, the number he said was billions. But it’s possible when he said that he was talking about hundreds of thousands of millions, but an incredible number of saplings of native trees. And this is for an enormous ongoing restoration project that’s really just starting.
I’m just wondering how common the version of ecological restoration that you’re talking about is on our landscapes right now?
Woolington: From my research, I don’t think it’s very common. And natural regeneration is overlooked and it’s understudied. One researcher who I talked to, Robin Chazdon, she’s a fellow with the World Resources Institute, and she co-authored a paper about natural regeneration, and urged ecologists globally to consider it. Her work shows that forests grow back, tropical forests grow back better on their own. And it’s actually cheaper, because when you’re buying so many hundreds of thousands of pounds of seeds or seedlings, that’s expensive and it’s also really hard to get plants to grow.
Miller: You point out that even the phrase “native” plants, if we’re talking about the example I just mentioned, of seedlings for the newly freed Klamath River or river banks, that it’s not as straightforward as saying, these are native plants. What are the challenges there, just even in that phrase?
Woolington: This can get pretty complicated but with such big restoration projects like the Klamath, I focused on how the BLM - the Bureau of Land Management - seeds after wildfires. And we’re talking about tens of thousands of acres, sometimes a quarter of a million of acres that they’re trying to re-seed and there’s not enough wild, collected seed from that particular site to then replant. Plants are very locally adapted. They have been evolving in a certain place for thousands of years and they have the genes that they’ve passed down to multiple generations to help them survive. And so some of these larger restoration projects, they don’t have those genetics and so they need to draw on the seed that’s available, which often, for BLM projects, is grass cultivars.
Miller: Before we go, I’m curious, if we’re talking only about different ways of arriving at the same endpoint - the more managed active planting seedlings, planting seeds that you’ve collected yourself, as opposed to letting nature do its course - if it’s just the system that’s different or if the endpoint is also different, the intended endpoint?
Woolington: I think natural regeneration, building a restoration project that would allow plants to come back on their own, will allow that plant population a greater chance at adapting to climate change, to their climate that they have evolved in for thousands of years. Plants have very particular places that they want to grow, even a few centimeters, a different change in soil type chemistry. Plants know where they want to grow and it’s really hard to recreate those ecosystems quickly within three to five years. I think as we mentioned before that maybe we need to have a little bit more patience and think a little bit more long-term, and these sites that I profile in my story, they were much cheaper to do. They didn’t spend as much money on seeds and natural regeneration is better at creating biodiverse landscapes.
Miller: Josephine Woolington, thanks very much.
Woolington: Thank you so much.
Miller: Josephine Woolington is an author and freelance writer in Portland. You can read her new article in High Country News.
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