Climate Smart Restoration Tool

The Climate Smart Restoration Tool (CSRT) was developed to provide information on seed collection and transfer of native plants. The CSRT maps current and future seed transfer limits for plant species with or without genetic information using climate data.

The goals of the CSRT are to:
● provide guidance for seed transfer by identifying areas with analogous climate for
current and midcentury time periods
● assess potential species for ecosystem restoration using compiled species data
from vegetation inventory plots
● infer vegetation transitions over time using current and midcentury climate to
predict changes in species frequencies

History of the Seedlot Selection Tool (SST) and the Climate Smart
Restoration Tool (CSRT).
The SST and CSRT were originally designed to have parallel methods to address seed transfer guidance for trees and non-trees, respectively. These web-based platforms included two approaches: generalized and genecological methods. Briefly, the generalized method uses climate variables to define seed transfer limits, and the genecological method uses existing species-specific trait data described by climate-based regression functions to define seed transfer limits. For more information on the SST methods see St.Clair et al. (2022). Given the substantial differences in the approaches described below, the genecological data within the CSRT has been transferred to the SST and the URL for the CSRT (https://climaterestorationtool.org/) houses the new generalized approach described below.