Surface Water Management Division

Native Plant Program

Using native plants to help preserve and enhance healthy ecosystem function and a water resource legacy for future generations.

• What is the Native Plant Program?
• Interested in learning more about native plants?
• Curious where the Native Plant Program gets its plants?
• Want to see projects which use native plantings?
• How can we tell if what we are doing is working?

What does the Native Plant Program Do?

The Snohomish County Native Plant Program supports the Surface Water Management mission by providing native plants and skilled plant installation for a variety of projects.

Project goals range from the minimization of damage from flooding and erosion to the protection and enhancement of our aquatic habitat and water quality.

The Native Plant Program also provides ongoing vegetation monitoring for these projects to guide our adaptive management approach to natural resource management.

Where the Plants Come From

The same types of plants from different places aren't always equally suited for survival in the same conditions. 

Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees can be found living here in Washington's western lowland forests. This environment is much different than what the Douglas Firs living on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains have adapted to.

The Native Plant Program considers these observations and gets its bare root plant stock from local nurseries throughout the Puget Sound lowlands and also from:

• The harvest of seeds and seedlings from project specific watersheds (i.e. from the lands surrounding a water body which drain to it)

• Within a project site's locally adapted gene pool when available (i.e. existing vegetation at a restoration site is propagated for that site)

Plants destined for Surface Water Management restoration sites arrive at the Snohomish County Native Plant Nursery, in Lake Stevens, during the winter months while they are dormant.

Highlighted Projects

Utilizing a Washington Conservation Corps crew and the support of community volunteers, the Native Plant Program prepares project sites for restoration, plants approximately 20,000 native plants per year in riparian zones, and provides vegetation monitoring for Snohomish County projects. Some projects examples include:

• Kuhlman Creek – This project began with two culvert replacements to reduce flooding and developed into a 4.5-acre salmon habitat improvement project involving partnerships with six private landowners.

• Mosher Creek – A restoration of a stream and wetland ecosystem to provide habitat for native wildlife including salmon, trout, and beaver with self-sustaining native vegetation.

• Mac's Blue Spruce - A natural drainage and vegetation enhancement project to restore the health and function of a neighborhood Native Growth Protection Area (NGPA).

• North Meander - A reconnection of an abandoned Stillaguamish River meander and the re-establishment of its floodplain forest for juvenile salmonid off-channel rearing and refuge habitat.

• The Stillaguamish Big Trees Project - These project sites involve conifer understory supplementation plantings of the Stillaguamish River riparian forest to address in stream temperatures exceeding TMDLs (total maximum daily limits) for salmonids.

Adaptive Management

After plants are installed at a restoration site they often become a part of the ongoing monitoring effort according to the protocol outlined in the Surface Water Management Vegetation Monitoring Manual.

Monitoring is critical to determining the relative success or failure of a project and is key to adopting an informed adaptive management approach to natural resource management. Primary interest is in documenting plant community composition change over time at stream, wetland, and forest rehabilitation and restoration projects across the county.

The monitoring efforts provide data used to determine if projects meet performance standards for grant funding and other obligations.

The support of salmon recovery is also a strong driver for data collection.

The changes detected in vegetation communities at restoration projects, are compared to reference reaches and the best available information on historic conditions to answer questions about if the plants are establishing, if ecosystem function is being restored, and if invasive plants are being controlled.

Surface Water Management staff uses this information along with other measures (e.g. habitat features and water quality) to determine the efficacy of different approaches to habitat restoration, enhancement, and creation.

This knowledge guides our continually evolving adaptive management approach and the development of Best Management Practices.   

Newsletters

Past Native Plant Program newsletters provide helpful information and highlight previous planting events. Browse the archive of "Going Native" and "Root and Twig" and see what the program has accomplished!

Contact

Scott Moore, Native Plant Steward, 425-388-6462