Seeds of Success in Lassen Volcanic National Park

Seed by seed in Lassen’s burn scar

When people picture putting a forest back together after a fire, they tend to picture trees: crews moving across burned landscapes with planting bars and bags of seedlings, trying to replace what was lost. It’s a picture of post-fire restoration in the West that we’re all growing accustomed to. On social media, we see statistics from agencies, industry, and nonprofits celebrating the hundreds of thousands of trees replanted across fire-scarred landscapes. And while tree planting is one important approach to post-fire reforestation, it is far from the whole picture.

Reforestation is slow, expensive, essential work. But a conifer seedling planted into bare, sun-baked ground is a seedling planted alone, without the biodiversity and ecological networks that existed before the high-severity burn. Long before a tree casts shade over a burn scar, grasses and wildflowers are doing some of the first and most important work. They hold soil in place, help keep sediment out of creeks, and can determine whether native plants or invasive weeds claim the ground first.

Quite rarely do native grasses and forbs get a planting crew of their own.

A burned landscape 5 years after the Dixie Fire seen from California State Route 44 inside Lassen Volcanic National Park

In Lassen Volcanic National Park (LAVO), the 2021 Dixie Fire burned through a large share of the park on its way to becoming California’s largest single wildfire in recorded history at 963,309 acres. This past season, for the first time, the park ran its own seed collection for the Seeds of Success program. The effort was started by Colleen Egan, botany specialist for LAVO, and carried out largely by Victoria Childress (Tori), a seasonal botany technician, both of whom were hired by Sierra Institute in partnership with the park. Sierra Institute has been partnering with LAVO since 2018 to build collective capacity to address the Park’s resource management needs. Tori spent the summer working roadsides and upland slopes throughout LAVO, gathering seed from ten California native species with a bucket, a clicker, and a binder thick with protocol.

Laying the groundwork

Colleen brought Seeds of Success to Lassen because she wants the park to have a strong native plant materials program of its own. She completed the program’s training, then brought Tori on to do the same and take on most of the seed and data collection, since Colleen’s work spans many other projects in the park.

The planning started the winter before. Colleen chose the species the park would collect, then scouted sites for each one: places where the plants grew in abundance, spread across an elevational gradient so seed would ripen at different times, and Tori could keep collecting from early summer into fall. Colleen’s six years of working in LAVO as a botanist made scouting easier. “My local knowledge of the park’s geography helped a lot,” she said.

Early in the field season, the two spent ample time in the field together. Colleen taught Tori about each species and how to identify them, along with the other associated native vegetation growing within each collection polygon, which the protocol requires collectors to record. Once Tori could work on her own, Colleen said, “She was off to the races.” Colleen continued assisting Tori with scouting, collecting voucher specimens, taking site photos, and gathering seed herself, and the two met almost daily to track which species at which sites were ready. When late summer brought the busiest stretch of ripening, volunteers and other Seeds of Success crews joined their collection efforts.

Tori collects Mountain pennyroyal (Monardella odoratissima) seeds from a roadside collection site in Lassen Volcanic National Park

Twenty-five years of seed

Seeds of Success, led by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), began in 2001 as a seed-banking program: collect wild seed, document where it came from, and put it into long-term storage to protect it against an uncertain future. Research came later. More recently, as megafires have reshaped landscapes across the West, the program has added another step: amplification—the grow-out of wild-collected seed on farms until there is enough to sow a burn scar rather than a garden bed.

Today, the national collection holds more than 27,000 native seed collections. In 2023, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service joined the BLM through an interagency agreement to help carry the work forward.

But none of this happens quickly. Seeds collected in Lassen two years prior, including woolly mule’s ears and mountain pennyroyal, are only now going into amplification.

“It takes time,” Tori said. “It’s not immediate.”

Choosing what survived

Paradoxically, some of the most valuable seeds in the park may come from the places that look the most damaged. When the team scouts look for collection sites, they often look inside the burn scar first.

“We’re looking for species that have persisted in the burn scar and demonstrated their ability to establish in these conditions,” said Tori.

The species selected for collection each year at LAVO are chosen with the realities of post-fire recovery in mind. They need to grow across much of the park, particularly on upland and intermediate sites rather than in meadows or wetlands. After a fire as large and varied as the Dixie Fire, restoration requires seed that can take root across a range of conditions.

The plants also need to be good competitors—species capable of establishing quickly and holding their ground against invasive plants, which can move into the park on visitors’ boots and take advantage of the bare, disturbed soil left behind by fire. Burn scars are especially vulnerable to that invasion.

Squirreltail, for example, establishes aggressively and sends out roots that help hold soil against erosion. Blue wildrye and California brome can fill in quickly, creating ground cover that helps shade out plants that don’t belong. Together, these grasses and wildflowers are not simply placeholders until the trees return. They are part of the first layer of recovery.

The ten species Tori collected this season were:

• Blue Wild Rye Elymus glaucus
• Slender wheatgrass Elymus trachycaulus
• Squirreltail Elymus elymoides
• California brome Bromus carinatus
• Slender penstemon Penstemon gracilentus
• Roezl’s penstemon Penstemon roezlii
• Naked buckwheat Eriogonum nudum
• Mountain pennyroyal Monardella odoratissima
• Woolly mule’s ears Wyethia mollis
• Jessica’s stickseed Hackelia micrantha

Wooly Mule’s Ears (Wyethia mollis) seeds during a collection in Lassen Volcanic National Park