Across much of the central United States there are ongoing efforts to restore native prairie. Returning native plants to the landscape can improve soil health, water quality and provide habitat for important wildlife and pollinators. Native seeds are a foundational part of this restoration work, but having enough of the right seeds requires a network of people who collect, grow and sell them.
To support restoration efforts in the Northern Great Plains region, a group of researchers from the Native Plant Initiative at South Dakota State University sought to understand how their native seed system worked and to identify ways they could support the existing networks.
"Native seed systems often have ecological, production or technological challenges," said Jennifer Zavaleta Cheek, assistant professor in the SDSU Department of Natural Resource Management. "We used social science and resilience and systems thinking to understand the people and relationships that make restoration possible. That allowed us to look not only at questions like seed infrastructure and production, but also at how culture, values, knowledge, relationships, institutions and economics shape the resilience of the system."
An article about this first-of-its-kind deep dive into the social aspects of native seed systems was recently published in People and Nature, a journal that focuses on the relationships between people and the natural world and a perfect fit for the study.
Guiding the work from the beginning was the Native Seed Strategy developed by the Northern Great Plains Native Seed Partnership. The plan identified a need to better understand the people and social dimensions of the native seed system in order to strengthen collaboration and restoration efforts and long-term resilience. There were many people involved in gathering information for the research including Elena Friedman, first author and August 2026 master's program graduate and Lora Perkins director of the Native Plant Initiative at SDSU. To get a better understanding of the system, the team conducted 60 detailed interviews with people involved in different facets of the network. These interviews revealed that the system itself was much more complex than they initially thought.
"One of the most important, and surprising, findings was that there isn't just one native seed system per region," Zavaleta Cheek said. "We went into the research thinking there was a singular system, but instead we found distinct seed systems operating in the same region, with different people, relationships and goals."
Two of the distinct seed networks they found were commercial and Tribal. Participants in the commercial network focused on collecting, producing, selling and using seeds for restoration. While ecological restoration was one of the goals of the Tribal system, participants often took a more community-based approach. They also use seeds for food and medicine and an important factor for them was considering the significance of native seeds in promoting reciprocity and sovereignty. Previous research that didn't include a deep understanding of each group's goals, practices and connections to native seeds may have determined that integrating the two systems would benefit both by increasing production. That potential misunderstanding emphasizes the importance of the current work.
"This is why we approached the native seed system as a social-ecological system," said Zavaleta Cheek. "Building resilience isn't only about having enough seed or the right infrastructure. It is also about strengthening the relationships, knowledge, values and institutions that allow people and native landscapes to thrive together over time."
Like the native seed network the research is based on, the next steps of the work has two different avenues. The researchers will continue working toward a better understanding of the relationship between people, native plants and resilient landscapes, with an additional focus on wild foods and the role they play in shaping resilient food systems. They also, with the support of the Native Plant Initiative, hope to work with specialty crop farmers to produce native seed to increase the production capacity and supply for restoration projects.
Regardless of where someone is in the native seed system, even for those outside the network entirely, the research team hopes to share the message of their findings with everyone.
"One takeaway I hope people have from our work is that plants and landscapes are cultural," Zavaleta Cheek said. "What we expect a landscape to look like, which plants we value and what we consider productive or worth restoring are shaped by our culture and our relationships with those landscapes. Those values can ultimately influence what we choose to conserve and restore. I want to better understand how we can sustain and restore these landscapes, and the native plants that make them what they are, for future generations."
The SDSU Department of Natural Resource Management is within the SDSU College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. In addition to Zavaleta Cheek and Perkins, Lauren Redmore, conservation social scientist for the U.S. Forest Service is an author on the linked publication.
