How this native plant "detective" solves the mysteries of desert species
Federal funding helps Kara Dohrenwend restore Utah's degraded habitats
The fairytale rock arches and towering red cliffs of Moab, Utah, inspire visitors to look up in awe. For native plant expert Kara Dohrenwend, the mysteries of the desert manifest down in the dirt. What secret signal compels a juniper seed to sprout, for example.
Junipers, a keystone tree in the desert Southwest, are failing to regenerate after the region’s ever-more frequent wildfires. There is a growing need for juniper seedlings in revegetation work, but there’s a problem, Dohrenwend says. “Nobody can figure out how to make those seeds grow.”
She’s tried several methods without luck, including planting scat from coyotes that dined on juniper berries. She finally resorted to digging up juniper seedlings from friends’ driveways and growing them out in her nursery. Why the plants thrive in driveways is still an unknown. Maybe the trick lies in the way the gravel heats up, or how it moves as cars and people pass.
Juniper germination is just one of the mysteries Dohrenwend contends with as the executive director of Rim to Rim Restoration. RRR is a Moab-based nonprofit that produces seeds and plants to restore landscapes that have been damaged by invasive plants, wildfire, irresponsible recreation and other stressors.
In recent years, a pulse of federal conservation funding has helped RRR to scale up its work. But there is now a pall over these advances. Upheavals in the federal government have seen her funding frozen and unfrozen. Federal agencies she has worked with for decades have had their staff and programs slashed.
For someone whose work operates on the slow, steady timescales of desert plants, it’s been a nerve-wracking time. “You can’t plan for the future,” Dohrenwend says, “if you don’t trust that the future will be there.”
The seeds of something bigger
In the early 1990s, Dohrenwend moved from Berkeley, Calif., to Moab to be a caretaker on a ranch. After a stint working for a local conservation nonprofit, she began talking with friends about the state of Mill Creek, which had been hammered by campers, horseback riders and invasive plants. They launched a program for at-risk youth to remove Russian olives from the creek, identify and plant native replacements, and repair trails. With the help of a federal grant, this work grew into RRR, which became a permanent nonprofit in 2007.
In 2009, RRR used private funding to purchase an old 30-acre peach orchard from The Nature Conservancy, with the goal of turning the plot into a nursery and site for seed production. The Mayberry Native Plant Propagation Center would help meet the growing demand from state and federal land managers, companies and others for native seed that is genetically adapted to local conditions.
The organization was able to buy the land thanks to a conservation easement, a voluntary legal agreement that permanently bars commercial development from working and natural lands.
RRR spent the next four years battling Russian knapweed, an aggressive, introduced species that requires Herculean effort to control. The Mayberry site manager was at last able to beat the invader back, but keeping it at bay sucked up time and money.
“We were truly running on a shoestring,” Dohrenwend says—and producing only limited amounts of seed.
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Beginning in 2021, two new laws—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—resulted in what Dohrenwend calls “significant” funding increases for native plant research, seed collection and propagation. RRR applied for, and received, grants from programs supported by each law.
“That funding allowed us to go from one human being managing 30 acres as best as he could, which largely just meant keeping the weeds down,” Dohrenwend says, to being able to hire a second full-time staffer and seasonal workers. This extra help meant that Mayberry could at last produce seed in significant quantities.
These grants helped to foster the financial stability that RRR’s employees needed for their detective work: how to grow finicky plants in a nursery setting, how to produce more seed, more reliably, even how to cultivate biocrust—colonies of lichens, mosses and microbes that are critical to the health of desert soils.
In regards to native plant production in the Colorado Plateau region, Dohrenwend says, “That kind of funding, in that kind of experimentation—that doesn't happen with private sector money.”
This year, however, this sense of stability was shaken. The federal government froze RRR’s funding in late January. Dohrenwend spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how she would pay her staff and how to break the news to them.
Though the funding was reinstated a month later, the experience, along with continuing deep cuts to federal conservation programs and agencies, has left Dohrenwend uneasy. “Even though now those funds have come back,” she says, “it sits in the back of my mind that they could be yanked at any time.”
Hope in hard times
For Dohrenwend, plants are more than just things to grow—they’re teachers. They can show us how to thrive in community, how to celebrate what makes us unique and how to live life at our own pace, neither wasting time nor resources.
They are also a potent symbol of hope. Buried seeds can suddenly transform a degraded or burned landscape, proving that what had appeared to be dead had only been patiently biding its time.
Dohrenwend recalls hiking to a wildfire burn scar with a team of volunteers and several hundred pounds of seed, hoping to create pollinator islands that would grow and spread. The next spring, she returned to find the landscape alive with the pale pink blossoms of Palmer’s penstemon, a native species that had long been absent from that area.
“It’s like wow, it worked. Look at that—the plants came up,” Dohrenwend says. “It always surprises me, even though it shouldn’t.”
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