Plant Conservation Alliance
The Plant Conservation Alliance (PCA) is a public-private collaboration among 17 federal agency Members and more than 400 non-federal Cooperators that share the same goal: to protect native plants by ensuring that native plant populations and their communities are maintained, enhanced, and restored. Join the PCA Email List!
PCA Members and Cooperators work collaboratively to solve the problems of native plant conservation and native habitat restoration, ensuring the sustainability of our ecosystems. In 2015 PCA developed the National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration to address widespread shortages of native seed. The depth and strength of PCA is in the scientific expertise, networking, and the ability to pool resources to protect, conserve, and restore our national plant heritage for generations to come.
To accomplish its goals, PCA has a National Framework for Progress in Plant Conservation that is carried out by a Federal Committee, a Non-Federal Cooperators Committee and five working groups.
In 2015, the Department of Interior awarded the BLM a $3.5 million grant through the Hurricane Sandy Supplemental Mitigation Fund for seed collection in coastal habitats from Virginia to Maine. BLM worked with New York City’s Greenbelt Native Plant Nursery and other PCA partners to develop the SOS East Program. To date, the SOS East teams have made over 2170 collections of 359 different species spanning 73 plant families, 11 states and 12 ecoregions. Additionally, 35 interns were hired through Chicago Botanic Garden’s Conservation and Land Management (CLM) internship program. This program provides hands-on experience to motivated and highly skilled recent college graduates. Seeds of Success East SOS East reached out to various Federal Agencies and identified 30 USFWS projects, 2 NPS projects, and 32 projects as needing native plant materials for restoration in 2015. One example of these projects is the FWS Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Tidal Marsh/Barrier Beach Restoration in Delaware. As of 2018, over 125 SOS East collections have been used for Hurricane Sandy restoration projects.
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PCA Federal Committee
The PCA Federal Committee works to identify and recommend, as appropriate, priority conservation needs for native plants and their habitats, and coordinate implementation of programs for addressing those needs. It serves as a forum for coordination and implementation of a national native plant conservation program, consisting of public education and outreach, research, conservation actions, native plant materials development coordination, databases and information exchange, and international programs. The PCA Federal Committee is chaired by Dr. Patricia De Angelis, Botanist with the US Fish & Wildlife Service-Division of Scientific Authority.
PCA Non-Federal Cooperator Committee
The PCA Non-Federal Cooperator Committee represents the interests and ideas of various organizations such as botanic gardens, universities, educational groups, state agencies, businesses, professional societies, trade associations, native plant societies, and garden clubs. The PCA Non-Federal Cooperator Committee partners with the PCA Federal Committee and others to advance plant conservation, promote native plant community restoration, and conduct botanical conservation science. The PCA Non-Federal Cooperator Committee is chaired by Dr. Kayri Havens, Ecology and Conservation Senior Scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Learn more at www.plantconservationalliance.org
Get Involved
PCA Bi-Monthly Meeting
The Plant Conservation Alliance holds bi-monthly meetings as an open forum for anyone interested or working in plant conservation. The meeting takes place remotely as a live webinar. There is a roundtable for attendees to share relevant events, a presentation and discussion on plant conservation related work by a guest speaker, as well as updates from each of the PCA working groups and committees. Regular attendees include representatives from the PCA Federal agencies and from Cooperating organizations. Anyone is welcome to attend this meeting.
For more information on upcoming meetings visit plantconservationalliance.org/meetings
Or join the PCA listserv to learn about upcoming meetings as well as announcements and discussions.
Join Us
Organizations, businesses, and local or state government divisions can join the Plant Conservation Alliance by filling out an online application.
For Federal agencies, joining in the Plant Conservation Alliance's Federal Committee requires signing the Memorandum of Understanding.