The Seed Pile Project
featuring Sacramento’s River District
Live, work, or spend time in Sacramento’s River District? Join the 2023-2024 Seed Pile Project!
We are excited to be partnering with The River District for our third year of Miridae Living Lab’s and UC Davis’s Seed Pile Project! This year we are implementing a much smaller project in order to restructure data collection to provide the best possible experience to our participants in the future. This year, all piles must be placed in the River District and we will be distributing 250 packets only. We are still focused on how transit corridors such as street, sidewalk, bike paths, and rail tracks can function as species corridors. So if you live, work, or spend time in The River District, we’d love to have you participate!
Still interested in the project but not in the River District? Don’t worry! We will be back in the greater Sacramento area next year.
Seed Pile Project Resources
Information on this year’s project, distribution hubs, and FAQs
Our seedling guide will help you identify the plants in our seed mix through all life stages
Project instructions, plus links to both online forms via Google Forms and printable forms
The Seed Pile Project is a community science initiative by Miridae Living Labs and UC Davis Landscape Architecture faculty to better understand the dynamics of native plant seed dispersal in human-dominated landscapes. It invites community participants to drop small piles of local, California native seeds in urban areas where they live or work, then monitor the results through repeated observations. Using data from participants on the conditions under which certain species of these locally adapted seeds spread, survive, or die, we can gain a better understanding of which native species to incorporate into the built environment and where to put them for the greatest ecological benefit and resilience.
