Meeting Forest Restoration Challenges: Using the Target Plant Concept

TLDR

Forest restoration depends on the successful establishment of plant materials such as seeds, cuttings, and seedlings. The Target Plant Concept offers a flexible framework for nursery managers and clients to enhance seedling survival and growth. TPC centers on a nursery–client partnership that prioritizes outplanting site performance, uses a matrix of project, site, species, and logistics questions to define a target plant, and incorporates post‑planting monitoring to refine future seedling production. Examples from the southeastern U.S., Hawai‘i, and Lebanon demonstrate that the TPC improves seedling performance in reforestation and forest restoration projects.

Abstract

Meeting forest restoration challenges relies on successful establishment of plant materials (e.g., seeds, cuttings, rooted cuttings, or seedlings, etc.; hereafter simply “seedlings”). The Target Plant Concept (TPC) provides a flexible framework that nursery managers and their clients can use to improve the survival and growth of these seedlings. The key tenets of the TPC are that (1) more emphasis is placed on how seedlings perform on the outplanting site rather than on nursery performance, (2) a partnership exists between the nursery manager and the client to determine the target plant based on site characteristics, and (3) that information gleaned from post-planting monitoring is used to improve subsequent plant materials. Through the nursery managerâ–client partnership, answers to a matrix of interrelated questions define a target plant to meet the reforestation or forest restoration objectives. These questions focus on project objectives; site characteristics, limiting factors, and possible mitigation efforts; species and genetic criteria; stocktype; outplanting tools and techniques; and outplanting window. We provide examples from the southeastern United States, Hawai‛i, and Lebanon on how the TPC process has improved performance of seedlings deployed for reforestation and forest restoration.