With crickets singing in the background on a warm September morning, Pati Vitt walked through a bumpy agricultural field teeming with weeds, old soybean plants, along with an occasional grasshopper and dragonfly.
“I just love this place,” she said Vitt, manager of restoration and ecology for the Lake County Forest Preserves. That’s because she sees so much promise as she walks to the top of a knoll and surveys the view at Grant Woods Forest Preserve in Ingleside.
Within the 1,200-acre preserve, 180 acres of fallow agricultural land will serve as a large-scale experiment in which Vitt hopes to discover information about climate change’s effect on native plants.
It is here where Vitt will challenge the accepted wisdom of using only seeds obtained from local native plants when restoring lands.
To do so, she’ll plant seeds from two different sources -– those close to home and others from as far away south as Kentucky. She wants to see how seeds obtained from different sources grow, how the plants fare and how they survive climate change.
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“I think of this as an absolute unique opportunity to push the boundaries of restoration ecology forward a little bit,” Vitt said.
Vitt, former curator of the seed bank at the Chicago Botanic Garden, said Illinois’ climate is predicted to be more like that of Oklahoma by the year 2050, and that of Texas by the year 2080.
Natural land managers are asking how that will affect their restoration efforts. The seeds gathered from little bluestem in a natural area in northern Illinois may work well in restoration projects today, but will they tomorrow? Or will restoration managers need seeds from plants that once grew in Kentucky or even farther south?
“It’s one of the big mysteries in restoration,” said Kayri Havens, senior director of ecology and conservation for the Chicago Botanic Garden, which is providing some seeds for Vitt’s forest preserve project.
“For decades, we though local seed is best adapted to our soils,” Havens said. “But our climate is changing. So we need to understand, will there be a cost using local seeds. Will (the restoration) not fare as well and should we be mixing in some seed from a climate that we expect in the future?”
Vitt obtained seeds that came from plants, including little bluestem and black-eyed Susan growing nearby, as well as in southern Illinois and Kentucky.
Forest preserves crew will clear the agricultural field and prepare the soil for planting. This fall, a third of the acreage will be planted with seeds sourced from local native plants. The rest will be planted with seeds of the same plants from the southerly sources. The staff also plans to plant gray-headed coneflower, wild bergamot and purple coneflower seeds from the same variation of sources in the experimental plot.
Then the monitoring begins: Which seeds germinate more readily? Which seedlings survive summer and winter, or grow faster? Which plants will be thriving a decade from now?
Finding these answers matters to the health of the region’s natural areas, Vitt and Haven agree. They say that healthy, thriving natural areas provide services to humans including flood mitigation and pollution control.
“Fundamentally, our natural areas and preserves provide ecosystem services to everybody –- clean water, clean air, flood reduction,” Vitt said. “They also provide resources for pollinators and other wildlife.
“Trying to determine how best to source seeds for our restoration is really important because we need to insure our restorations are resilient, that they work well regardless of the changing conditions. That’s the real problem of climate change. It has such a huge potential to decrease our preserves’ ability to provide those services.”
Few large-scale experiments like the one at Grant Woods have been done, Vitt said, but she can point to smaller experiments that show the importance of using the right seeds when restoring an area.
She’s an adviser to graduate student Robert Hevey of Glenview, who has shown that a native Illinois plant grows differently depending on where the seed was obtained.
Hevey, who is working on a Ph.D in plant biology and conservation at Northwestern University, did field trials on the germination and growth of a common type of bush clover, from seeds sourced close by and in Georgia.
Though he’s still processing the data, he said, he’s finding that, “the shoots tend to be much taller and root systems much shallower,” in plants that grew from the seeds obtained from Georgia, compared with plants grown from seeds obtained nearby.
Another example is the federally endangered pitcher’s thistle. In the 1990s, Havens, Vitt and others were involved with a pitcher’s thistle reintroduction project at Illinois Beach State Park in Zion. They planted pitcher’s thistle seeds from Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin at the state park where the plant historically grew. The plants from the Indiana seeds had a higher population growth rate compared with those from Wisconsin, Vitt said.
Havens said the Chicago Botanic Garden also experimented with Pitcher’s thistle seeds grown in different climate conditions. As expected, each had a different survival rate, she said.
“This is not just a local issue,” Havens added. “This is a global issue. This is the decade of restoration. We are recognizing that human activities have degraded so many of the natural areas around the world.”
She said researchers worldwide are beginning to study restoration techniques related to climate change.
Said Vitt: “If we aren’t careful about how we do our restoration and land management, we run the risk of not having resilient habitats in 50 years.”