The Gardens at the Society for Ecological Restoration International Conference

Every other year, the Society for Ecological Restoration hosts an international conference convening restoration researchers and practitioners from around the globe. This year, the conference was held in Denver, and we had the opportunity to not only attend the conference but share the Gardens with participants. Staff from across several departments attended and presented our ongoing research. Our engagement started well before the conference -- we participated in planning and also grew native plants to use for display at the conference that were then planted at the Plains Conservation Center after the meeting.  

I partnered with colleagues from Naples Botanical Garden, North Carolina Botanical Garden and Chicago Botanic Garden to present on the role of botanic gardens in supporting the native seed supply for restoration. April Goebl presented her work on increased within-species genetic diversity for restoration. Graduate student Meredith Prentice also presented a poster on her thesis work relating post-fire plant communities.  

At the beginning of the conference, we led a field trip for conference participants to Chatfield Farms to learn about our restoration efforts across scales. We highlighted the experiments we are doing that help inform restoration from backyards to larger open spaces and consider genes to community level processes. We were able to show a multi-year small-scale prairie restoration and several experiments assessing different seeding and planting techniques, local adaptation for seed sourcing, community composition, and site preparation.  

The best part of attending these types of events is learning cutting edge research and new techniques and meeting with colleagues new and old in person. It is truly invigorating to feel connected by our shared work and mission and to use the lessons learned to improve what we are doing. This year was particularly rewarding because there were so many researchers from other botanic gardens from around the world. I was able to organize an impromptu dinner with most of them, and we not only had a lovely evening connecting over shared issues and opportunities, but we left with some concrete ways we can continue to partner and engage the botanic garden community in restoration even more.