What we are doing together

The Southern Ontario Seed Strategy will help prioritize actions to help grow more native plants, grow them better, and set a course for future restoration. The SOSS seeks to restore relationships with native plants in Southern Ontario. Native plants gift our world with resilience, integrity, stability, beauty, connection, love, wonder and hope. They come from wild, local communities and have deep relationships with other native organisms and are adapted to local land and water. Despite being often marginalized as weeds, native plants are powerful in their ability to protect the water, air, and soil, supporting ecosystems and quality of life for all.

Colonialism has created crises of extinction and climate and adds millions of exotic plants to the landscape every year. With ancient ingenuity, native plants show us another way forward to regenerate relationships for healthy and sustainable landscapes. They share potential to connect hearts, minds, bodies, knowledge, habitat, and opportunities for all generations to thrive. By prioritizing locally grown and sourced seeds, we will learn about our native species, the land and each other. The seeds we protect, and plant now will define our future.

By working together through the development of the SOSS, we are increasing our capacity to protect and propagate the diversity of native seeds and plants we need to restore, enhance and expand healthy landscapes. We will explore ways to:

• Support Indigenous-led rematriation and seed sovereignty
• Protect genetic diversity of seeds
• Create space for native plants everywhere from local sources
• Empower people to grow healthy vital native plant populations

The SOSS collective gathers monthly in ethical space to work together on developing a seed strategy through knowledge sharing, discussion, and working groups. The collective development of a draft strategy is to be completed by early 2024.

The SOSS is a journey to connect places by restoring the flow of seed

The SOSS acknowledges/recognizes that southern Ontario is the unceded traditional territories of many nations, where Indigenous people continue to steward ancestral seed, as they have for millennia in this place. Rooted in the land, plant communities express the history of the land to those that understand them. Healthy plant populations sustain processes of both dispersal and local adaptation based on this heritage and these connections.

Southern Ontario is a highly productive landscape, but its unique ecosystems face many pressures driven by colonial attitudes and practices, such as habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and climate change. This region is home to the highest diversity of wild species, a quarter of Canada’s human population, and is home to more Species at Risk than anywhere else in the country. Less than 15% of this landscape is protected and habitat levels in some areas are far below the 30-50% minimum recommended for healthy landscapes.

On this landscape the SOSS will help protect healthy plant populations as seed sources for future restoration, including historical remnants and old growth ecosystems. It will support, uncover, and accelerate new opportunities and innovations to grow seed orchards and a robust connective network of healthy habitat and high-quality natural infrastructure.

SOSS Collective Meeting Schedule