JFNew Native Plant Nursery is proud to introduce an important ecological innovation to the native plant materials market-ecoregional genotyping. We are pioneering the effort to use universally recognized ecological regions when specifying native plant materials.
Many federal agencies and private organizations including the USDA Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy and The Sierra Club.
The biological diversity of Earth occurs in differing regions or patterns. These regions are called ecological regions- ecoregions for short. The boundary and area of each ecoregion is determined by climate, soil chemistry, soil composition and geology. Ecoregions change, they evolve over geologic time.
Ecoregions provide a landscape-level framework for organizing ecosystems. Over time, plants and animals have adapted to the varying conditions in each ecoregion. Although a given species may be represented in many ecoregions, the genetic make up of that species may vary between ecoregions. It is important to understand that plants do not conform to geopolitical boundaries. They evolve adaptations to specific ecoregions. When specifying native plant materials for your next project, we recommend that you use materials that originate from within the same ecoregion. If you cannot locate the desired species from a given ecoregion, then you should look for materials from an adjacent ecoregion. The farther away you move, the less desirable results you will obtain.
