Hacia una estrategia española de producción, certificación y uso de semillas de plantas herbáceas autóctonas

Propuesta para una estrategia española de gestión y certificación de semillas de especies herbáceas autóctonas

Native plants for greening Mediterranean agroecosystems

In the upcoming United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a global challenge for scientists and practitioners will be to develop a well-functioning seed production sector on the basis of a sound species-selection process. To balance crop production with biodiversity functions in Mediterranean woody crops, agroecological practices suggest the need to move towards the establishment of herbaceous ground covers. However, establishing such plants requires a supply of suitable native seeds, which is currently unavailable. Here, we present a comprehensive process for selecting regionally adapted species that also emphasizes considerations for seed production. Using olive groves as a target system, we found that research on ground covers for regenerative agriculture has largely overlooked native species at the expense of commercial and ill-suited varieties. Our assessment of native annuals showed that 85% of the grasses and forbs evaluated exhibit a suite of ecological and production traits that can be tailored to meet the requirements of farmers, seed producers and environmental agencies. These findings suggest that many native species are neglected in agronomic research, despite being potentially suitable for ground covers and for supporting a nature-based solution in restoration practice. The framework used here may be applied in other agroecosystems to follow global greening initiatives and to support native seed production to scale up restoration.This research was funded by the PEOPLE/Marie Curie Actions of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under REA grant agreement number 607785 through the ITN project NASSTEC (www.nasstec.eu). B.J.-A. was further supported by the Marie Curie Clarín-COFUND programme of the Principality of Asturias and the European Union (ACB17-26) and the Asturias regional grant number FC-GRUPIN-IDI/2018/000151