Native Species Selection
With our knowledgeable team and in-house scientific tools, we can help you to understand how your land functions and which native species will perform best for your goals.
How does Native Species Selection work?
Choosing the right plant species for restoration projects can be challenging, but we’ve made the process straightforward and accessible to anyone.
Our models quantify the environmental conditions that native plant communities typically inhabit and compare these to your site’s current conditions at time of sampling. This environmental quantification allows our species selection algorithms to be flexible and determine best matches for even the most exceptional sites existing in human landscapes. Further this allows us to provide recommendations that may be adaptable under climate change.
By combining advanced technology with ecological expertise, we provide reliable context-specific native plant recommendations to your projects succeed. Whether you’re running a large restoration program, if just need help with a garden, our tools and services help you to choose the right species.
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AI-assisted pattern recognitiion
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Site attribute matching
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Associated species weighting
Which Site Attributes are Being Evaluated?
The factors that determine whether a species can thrive in a specific location aren’t a mystery. Soil type, sunlight exposure, water availability herbivory, and other measurable site attributes interact in predictable ways to play a dominant role in determining which native species can survive. By understanding these relationships, we can model how a wite’s conditions influence the success, or ultimate failure, of nearly any native plant species.
Our approach closely simulates the role of an experienced ecologist who is able to discern the potential of a site and recommend appropriate species. Our models take that ability even further to evaluate site attributes unseen and site attributes that vary over time. By evaluating a species’ tolerances against how site conditions varies over time, we can identify those species with the best chance of success.
This is the foundation of our model. It’s a system that uses a large amount of real world environmental, geological, and botanical data to deliver insights that help you select the right species for any site in the mid-Atlantic and nearby ecoregions.
What are the different levels of service?
If you are a business partner or frequent customer, a simple phone call to one of our ecologists on nursery staff can start the process to get you the information you need.
If you are a project manager that inherited a planting plan, you can submit the plant to us for a formal design review by one of our ecologists. With some information about the site conditions and projects goals, we can rapidly spot inconsistencies, highlight potential problems, and recommend alternatives for the designers’ consideration.
If you work for a conservation organization and need to understand the plant communities or set of species that a particular site can support, you can submit a request for a remote analysis. You will need to complete a site evaluation form for the site to be analyzed remotely, which could require you to visit the site.
If you are a land manager, large property owner, landscape architect, or civil engineer, we offer our ecologist-assisted native species selection service. This involves sending an ArcheWild ecologist to delineate your site into ecological management zones. Each zone will receive a full ecological evaluation, examining all of the major abiotic and biotic factors that influence the choice of native plants for hte project, which yields a recommended species list tailored to the conditions present (or planned) and the future management objectives of the landowner.
Our tools are not available online to the general public, but business partners can request access.
Build Authenticity into Your Restoration Plan
Choose the right plants for your restoration project.
Phone Call
Sometimes all you need is a quick chat with a practicing ecologist. Call 855-752-6862 and ask to speak to an ecologist. We'll call you back.
- Phone call for up to an hour
- Plant list review
- Inconsistency checks
- Recommended alternatives
Remote Analysis
Send us your site description, an overview of the project's intent, and your plant list if you have one. 8-hour turnaround service is normal.
- Site evaluation assitance
- Plant list review
- Full model analysis for one site
- Recommended species lists
Onsite, Ecologist-assisted
Ecologist-assisted service that produces reliable species recommendations at a fine scale. Suitable for most restoration projects.
- Site visit for up to 8 hours
- Ecological zone mapping
- Full model analysis for each zone
- Prescriptive species lists for each zone
