This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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 and 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, an 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 deep dive into the social aspects of native seed systems was recently published in People and Nature. 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 to strengthen collaboration, restoration efforts and long-term resilience. Many people were involved in gathering information for the research, including Elena Friedman, the first author and an 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.
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