Most days of the week, Jess Colby, a land steward, can be spotted in the woods of Vermont on state-owned land with a team on her side, pruners in hand, and a ladder. Colby pulls seed pods directly off of trees, collecting as many seeds as she can in a day's work.
“This spring, we collected 960 grams of seeds. That was mostly fluffy seeds, so that’s millions and millions of seeds,” said Colby, the Riparian Lands Program Coordinator at NorthWoods Stewardship Center, a nonprofit based on land conservation in northern Vermont and New Hampshire.
Colby’s team is collecting seeds to replant along the shores of waterways, creating ecosystems that are resistant to floods. Large masses of land surrounding Vermont waterways have historically been turned into agricultural lands, reducing biodiversity, said Colby. This land, she added, is often dominated by invasive species like reed canary grass.
When waterways overflow onto land with a lack of biodiversity, the water moves through the landscape quickly, damaging communities on the outskirts, said Joshua Morse, spokesperson at Vermont Fish and Wildlife.
Wetlands rich in biodiversity along Otter Creek in Middlebury protected the town from more than $1.8 million of flood damage during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, according to research by the University of Vermont. People who visited the floodplains at Otter Creek after the storm would have seen tons of water being held there, Morse said.
With a grant from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Colby’s team has worked to create more lands like Otter Creek to decrease flood damage as the risk increases with climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
The project started in 2021 when Peter Emerson, a fisheries biologist at Vermont Fish and Wildlife, requested seeds from NorthWoods while he worked on a program reestablishing floodplain forests in agricultural lands called the Cornfield Replication Project.
“Pete was like ‘Hey, can you grab us some seeds?’ So, we began collecting a lot,” Colby said. “We put them down, and then a flood would happen and would wash them all away, and we’d start over again.”
The project picked up in 2023 when Brooke Fleischman was hired as the Statewide Seed Coordinator at the Intervale Center, a nonprofit in Burlington that works to enhance agricultural viability. The Intervale hosts a conservation nursery where plants are grown and sold to be planted along floodplains, eventually bolstering Vermont waterways.
The Intervale and NorthWoods began a partnership in 2023 called the Riparian Lands Native Seeds Partnership in which Fleischman coordinates seed collection carried out by NorthWoods. This partnership allowed the nursery to grow native plants.
“We are making this effort to collect locally adapted native seeds so that they are more adapted to our area and not from a bunch of random places across the Midwest,” Fleischman said.
This season, Fleischman requested the collection of silver maple, aspen, black willow and cottonwood, species that are all native to the area and support flood mitigation.
“Our biggest collection has been silver maple. We were able to go out to sites all over the Northeast Kingdom and keep collecting for days,” Colby said. “Right now, we are struggling trying to get serviceberry. They aren’t ripening up as much as past years.”
Fleischman said they are always looking to work with more organizations across Vermont and to grow their collections and planting sites.
“The dream is for it to continue and keep expanding,” Fleischman said.
The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
