Orange County Register

Wildfire, development, invasions by non-native plants: keeping Orange County’s remaining native habitat healthy can require a great deal of management and intervention.

The Irvine Ranch Conservancy, in fact, hopes to restore about 2,000 acres of land to a more natural state over the next 10 years on the wild lands it manages.

Buying enough native plant seeds on the open market for such a project can be an iffy proposition at best.

“When you’re operating on the scale we’re talking about, there isn’t enough native seed in Southern California to supply an operation like that,” said Mike O’Connell, executive director of the conservancy.

So why not grow your own? The conservancy is doing just that, clearing about an 18-acre parcel that was an orchard before the 2007 Santiago Fire.

They will grow coastal sage brush, also called artemesia, California buckwheat, white sage, California poppies — about 16 species in all.

The conservancy will be “taking seed from young plants, and growing what will be seed producers,” O’Connell said. “Each acre the farm yields will be able to restore roughly 10 acres.”

The plants can be watered as required because they will be used only for seed stock, not for revegetating wild land. Land managers can sometimes have trouble with cultivated natives when they are replanted in harsher conditions than they’re used to, O’Connell said.

“The farm is essentially a seed factory,” he said.

The conservancy has come up with some other interesting innovations, he said. They might seek out varieties of natives that are more accustomed to hot, dry conditions, so its descendants can handle hotter, drier conditions expected to result from climate change.

And to decide how to priortize restoration sites, they’ve developed a computer model based on the way businesses calculate likely return on investments. The model relies on many variables to set the priorties; for example, if a site would enhance both fire prevention and endangered species habitat, it would rise higher on the list.

“What the computer model allows us to do is take every one of these candidate sites for restoration and assign values for every variable,” O’Connell said.

The ground is being prepared now with help from the Orange County Fire Authority; planting could begin in the fall.

(Photo of bulldozer preparing site courtesy Wida Karim, Irvine Ranch Conservancy.)

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