At the 2026 National Native Seed Conference, Rob Massatti presented work with Trevor Faske and collaborators on a practical question facing restoration programs across the western United States: when wild seed is grown in agricultural fields so there is enough seed for large restoration projects, how much of the original genetic diversity is retained?
The question matters because native seed is not interchangeable. Restoration seed needs to be available in useful quantities, but it also needs to represent the genetic variation that helps plants establish, persist, and respond to changing conditions. The National Seed Strategy frames this goal as getting the right seed in the right place at the right time.
Why agricultural increase is needed
Restoration projects often require far more seed than can be collected directly from wild populations. To meet that need, seed collected from wild plants is commonly increased in agricultural production fields. This approach can make restoration possible at landscape scales, but it also creates a new question: does the seed production process change the genetic makeup of the seed source?
The talk focused on three workhorse native grasses used in restoration: blue grama, sideoats grama, and sand dropseed. These species differ in important biological ways. Some have complex chromosome variation, and one is largely self-fertilizing. Those traits can influence which plants successfully move from wild collections into production fields and ultimately into harvested seed.
What the study found
Across the three grasses, the agricultural increase step itself caused relatively minor genetic shifts. The larger changes happened earlier, between the original seed collection and the establishment of the production field. In other words, the most important genetic filtering may occur before a production field is fully underway.
The results also showed that species biology matters. Blue grama, an outcrossing species, largely behaved as expected: wild plants and production-field plants represented a similar genetic pool. Sideoats grama showed stronger shifts related to chromosome-level variation. Sand dropseed, a mostly self-fertilizing species, lost genetic diversity because some lineages represented in the wild were not carried forward into production.
The work also tested a common assumption: combining seed from more wild populations should keep adding useful diversity. In these data, combining four to five wild populations captured most common genetic diversity, while adding more populations contributed relatively little additional common variation and may add other kinds of risk or complexity.
What this means for restoration
For land managers, growers, and restoration partners, the takeaway is not that agricultural production is a problem. The takeaway is more careful and more useful: production systems should be designed with species biology in mind. Collection timing, repeated collection events, seed storage, greenhouse propagation, and field establishment may all influence which genetic lineages make it into the final seed lot.
Better information about these early steps can help restoration programs scale up native seed while maintaining the genetic diversity that makes seed ecologically valuable. That is especially important as agencies, Tribes, growers, and restoration practitioners work to expand the diversity of native species and seed sources available for restoration.
Interested in this work? See LSC's native seed production service or contact us about seed source development and genetic monitoring through agricultural increase.