The Oregon Native Seed Strategy is a guidance document that supports ecological restoration and conservation through the procurement, preservation, and production of native seed in Oregon.
Vision: Return Oregon lands to diverse, functional, and resilient ecosystems by using the right seed in the right place at the right time.
Mission: To ensure the availability of ecologically appropriate seed to conserve and restore diverse native plant communities and sustainable landscapes.
Why do we need the Oregon Native Seed Strategy?
The Oregon Native Seed Strategy is needed to coordinate and expand the state's native seed supply chain in response to increasing environmental challenges and restoration demands. Oregon is experiencing unprecedented environmental pressures, including devastating wildfire seasons that burned over 1 million acres in 2012, 2020, and 2024, creating an urgent need for landscape-scale restoration. In many disturbed areas, the native seed bank that historically allowed natural recovery has been depleted or replaced by invasive species, limiting the ecosystem's natural ability to regenerate. Additionally, Oregon's ecosystems are affected by the spread of invasive weeds, altered wildfire regimes, habitat modification from urbanization and agriculture, and the impacts of climate change.
Native seeds are crucial for restoring these damaged landscapes by maintaining biodiversity, providing essential ecosystem services like wildlife and pollinator habitat, maintaining water and air quality, sequestering carbon, stabilizing soil, preventing erosion, and providing culturally significant materials for indigenous peoples. Thousands of pounds of seed are used annually in Oregon for revegetation efforts, but currently, relatively few of Oregon's more than 3,500 native plants are typically used, leading to a decrease in overall plant diversity. This loss of diversity reduces ecosystem resilience, making landscapes more vulnerable to future disturbances and climate change impacts.
The Oregon Native Seed Collective (ONSC) and regional network partners will implement this Strategy by expanding seed collection and production efforts, developing grower-support mechanisms, improving seed cleaning and storage capacity, and creating better coordination between land managers and seed producers. Through this partnership of diverse collaborators, the ONSC will help stabilize the native seed market by forecasting demand, providing economic support structures, and streamlining procurement processes, ultimately making ecologically appropriate native seed more readily available for restoration projects across the state.
Oregon Native Seed Collective
The Oregon Native Seed Collective (ONSC) is a partnership of organizations working together to increase the availability and use of native seed for restoration, rehabilitation, and mitigation projects in Oregon, while also conserving Oregon's botanical biodiversity. It brings together diverse collaborators including federal, tribal, state, and private partners to work towards common critical objectives like expanding seed collection efforts, facilitating research, developing resources for land managers and growers, and implementing conservation seed banking programs.
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