Burned Seed

For restoring land burned by wildfire, reseeding is often a necessary solution. The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service supports post-fire reseeding by providing Foundation seed through the Plant Materials Center in Aberdeen, Idaho. At the Aberdeen Plant Materials Center, plants with a potential to help protect and heal damaged landscapes are grown, tested, and evaluated. The center evaluates and selects plants with desired traits, and develops the seed source to release as Foundation seed. "Foundation seed comes from plants that are evaluated to ensure they can become established and perform under specific conditions," said Loren St. John, Team Leader at the Aberdeen Plant Materials Center.  "We then grow and process Foundation seed which is made available to certified seed growers that produce the large amounts of commercial seed for sale to landowners and managers.The plant releases that we have made here at Aberdeen since 1939 are currently being used not only for revegetation after wildfire, but for rangeland restoration seedings, pasture and hay land and soil erosion control." Soil in burned areas may contain native plant seeds, but where a fire burned hot the seeds in the soil also burned. For those areas, seeding is very likely to be needed