Welcome to the Native Plant Seed Mapping Toolkit! These tools help meet objectives pertinent to restoration planning and implementation.
The Seed Selection Tool allows users to visualize the climatic similarity between a restoration material’s (RM’s) location of origin and a defined geographic area. We use “restoration material” to refer to any type of seed used in a restoration treatment (e.g., germplasms, cultivars, wild-collected, source-identified, etc.). This tool helps users 1) prioritize which RMs may be best matched to a restoration site and 2) identify locations where RMs need to be developed. RM origins are uploaded as a text file or can be selected from a table of commonly-used RMs across the Intermountain West. When multiple RMs are selected, this tool can either 1) display a map identifying RMs that surpass the user-defined climate similarity threshold, or 2) split climate space within the defined region into as many partitions as there are RMs, with each partition showing the geographic area over which one RM is most closely matched.
The Climate Partitioning Tool allows users to split climate variation into a selected number of groups, or partitions, across a defined geographic area. Users may also upload geographic points that are displayed on top of the climate partitions; these points may represent, for example, wildland seed collections. As such, the tool allows users to 1) visualize the geographic distribution of environmental gradients across a region, 2) investigate how seed collections represent environmental variation across a geographic area, and 3) identify collection gaps to prioritize future seed collection. Climate and partition data can be downloaded for geographic points, which may assist in downstream activities like choosing seed sources for composite native plant materials development strategies (e.g., Bucharova et al. 2019).
