November 14, 2024

The Fire in Prospect Park and the Essential Role of Seed Banks

When I heard on the news that there was a fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, my heart skipped a beat. This was personal. I looked at the date and, coincidentally, it was 40 years, almost to the day, when I first went to work in Prospect Park. The reports said the fire was in the Nethermead section of the Park, but when I saw the first image, I knew exactly where it was. This was the Ravine, the wooded heart of the Olmsted landscape, and the section I and my colleagues had worked to restore some thirty years ago.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, we had fires in the Park, including in the Ravine. It’s difficult to explain to present day users just how different the woods were then. Really, they weren’t even woods, just a collection of surviving, unhealthy trees, devoid of any meaningful understory and severely eroded, often twelve inches or more of soil gone. What remained was hard and compacted, almost like concrete. So, what was left to burn? Mostly oak leaves that the wind would swirl around and accumulate in depressions. These would prove irresistible to firebugs. Our immediate response would be to try and guide FDNY safely to the site, and hopefully, keep the trucks on sidewalks and out of the landscape, minimizing further damage to the trees.

Once the fires were out, there was really nothing more we could do to help restore the health of the burnt areas. Natural regeneration was severely limited, as there were not even young seedlings growing there. There certainly was not any available and appropriate plant material for post fire planting.

I am now retired from New York City Parks and live 350 miles away.  I have not, as of yet, been able to talk to my successors at Prospect Park to learn what their plans are for recovery. Thanksgiving will take me be back to the area, and I’m hoping I can drop in and see for myself just what the fire did.

What I do know is that there is one major change from 40 years ago that will significantly increase and speed up recovery efforts. Back in the late 1980’s, when we were devising the plan to restore the Ravine, we needed appropriate native plants. At that time, there were no commercial sources for natives, so we got inventive and grew them ourselves. Eventually, over three phases of the Ravine restoration, three quarter of a million locally sourced native plants were grown and planted there. Out of this project, we then launched the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, perhaps the nation’s only, certainly its largest and longest-running, municipally owned and operated native plant nursery.

For twenty five years the Center has grown and on average produced upwards of a half million native plants a year for land management and restoration throughout the five boroughs. A seed bank is maintained at the facility, containing on average two thousand or more collections of over five hundred species, about two thirds of the wild plant species still present in the City. This is seed that is sourced by dedicated and talented staff who scour the immediate region for healthy plant populations to sustainably harvest seed from. For the last ten years, the Center has even learned how to take that same wild seed and increase it to bulked quantities suitable for seeding large areas. When I left, there were 75 species that had been increased in this way, with many species suitable for consideration in using to revegetate the burned woodland areas.

Today, unlike in those early days, as managers turn to available options to drive restoration of these precious woods, they have invaluable resources to turn to in the guise of a functioning native plant nursery and its extensive seed bank collection.

I’m sure these woods, as they’re visited in the coming days and weeks by the citizens of Brooklyn, will present a dismal and discouraging picture. For the millions of annual visitors to Prospect Park, this is their piece of nature. But the future of the Ravine is not grim, it is hopeful. There is soil again in the Ravine, and it will be interesting to see what has survived the fire and begins to regenerate on its own. With great certainty, they’ll be joined by a legion of invasives, led by garlic mustard. A grand experiment is underway. The good news is that there are now these powerful tools available to aid them as they seek to restore not only what has been lost, but to possibly introduce even greater biodiversity as they do so. We weren’t so lucky all those years ago.

Seed banks are essential tools that are vastly under-recognized and under-supported, and rarely thought of. But just like the Library of Congress, here is a resource that we may largely ignore until that moment arrives when the need becomes apparent and we realize just what it is we have. New York City is so very fortunate to have this resource, but much of the region and the nation as a whole does not.

In an age of climate change with increased natural disasters, we need to realize just how invaluable seed banks are and give them the sustained support they need, so that they’re there for the next time, just when we need them. 

Edward Toth Executive Officer