Longleaf Regeneration Anyone Can Do
Precision Direct Seeding
The Seed Crown® origin story began with a simple question - what if growing longleaf could be as easy as sticking a seed in the ground and watching it grow? Nature did it that way for millennia with great success but man’s efforts to regenerate longleaf has often proved frustratingly difficult. Consequently, the riddle posed is how to get from a seed in a tree at one location to reliably having a seedling growing in another with the least amount of work in between. The precision direct seeding method coupled with Seed Crown® shelters appears to be an answer, having achieved seed-to-surviving-seedling rates at the one-year mark exceeding 60% for longleaf seeds planted straight into the forest floor, with average success rates for thousands of seeds across dozens of test plots greater than 30% after one year. This approach may offer new hope for direct seeding, especially in settings where conservation objectives are more important than speed to merchantable forest products or the scale doesn’t justify hiring commercial contractors to plant industrial nursery stock. While experiments with other species advance at the pace trees grow, wider availability of Seed Crowns® will hopefully lead others to discover additional applications among native plants and other hard-to-regenerate flora.
Longleaf Direct Seeding – A Path Once Traveled
For much of the Twentieth Century, longleaf luminaries like James P. Barnett (pictured to the left - USFS SRS-187, Cover Photo J.P. Barnett) and many other forest professionals made substantial efforts to develop direct seeding techniques for regenerating the iconic tree, including the use of aircraft and various land-based operations. Heavy predation losses from birds, rodents, and insects, however, overtaxed seed sources and generally made direct seeding unreliable. As an interesting aside, Canadian foresters at about the same time tried using what they called “biodegradable” seed shelters for regenerating conifer species in the boreal forests but vegetative fouling, the expense of the plastics chosen, complexity of the design, and labor requirements convinced the researchers to abandon those efforts. As recently as 2006, graduate researchers in Montana showed that combining seed planting techniques that mimic bird caches with large cage shelters produced germination and survival rates competitive with nursery stock for whitebark pine. Although these and a few other techniques found a measure of success, direct seeding has all but vanished as a reforestation tool and, as a result, longleaf and other keystone tree species are regenerated today almost exclusively with planted seedlings started either in containers or bareroot beds at industrial-scale nurseries.
The site preparation expense and various logistical requirements of these standard methods make reforestation impractical for many sites, especially those involving small acreage, difficult to access locations, or those motivated primarily by conservation objectives.
As we continue to learn more about the importance of keystone tree species to many habitat types and the remarkable genetic diversity within species, and as interest in conservation objectives grows among governments and nonprofit organizations, situations where planting nursery stock ranges from less than ideal to completely infeasible represent a substantial missed regeneration opportunity.