SLOSS In An Era of At-Home Umbrellas
Left unconsidered during the SLOSS debate of the 70s and 80s was the potential for new technology to emerge and more easily connect decentralized small restorations for any given region. This initial debate occurred before the emergence of the internet, let alone iNat and its potential for umbrella projects containing several at-home restorations.
Current thinking is that ...the SLOSS debate should be refined and cannot be solved without explicit spatial consideration of dispersal and environmental dynamics. Here again, the potential for new technology is being ignored.
Once regional umbrellas for several small at-home restorations exist, dispersal formerly achieved by ants and turtles can be achieved by humans in the form of restorative gardeners. Solomon’s Plume (Maianthemum racemosum) and Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) have each expanded to cover my project area after honeysuckle was removed over 15 years ago. These colonies have expanded to the point of being constrained by roads that I can’t disassemble and neighboring properties where I have no authority to conduct invasive removals, let alone full scale restoration.
What I prefer to do is share these locally adapted genotypes with other local smalls who are just starting on their restorations. I have no formal training in this so it makes sense to do this work on this network while inviting oversight from the exact group of people that can tell me what is most reasonable to share. I feel pretty confident about sharing these two species. I feel less confident about the sharing of species with more rarity. I realize I’m not the best person to assess what to share and how to share it. Despite all this, I’m fairly certain that decentralized sharing of multiple local genotypes at scale might be more compelling than centralized sharing of a few local genotypes.
A box turtle is unlikely to use the crosswalk when carrying mayapple seeds to other gardeners in my region. If I use iNat to identify the parent colony when sharing these seeds my fellow gardeners can link to my parent colony after establishing a casual child on their lot where no Mayapple currently exists. In this sense, I’ll be able to see how my genotypes spread across my region. If there become too many of mine, wise restorationists will clamor for someone else’s… but only if the software exists to track provenance. And… it does!
