Our DC-Area Restoration Work
The Earth Sangha operates a volunteer-based restoration program for the greater Washington, DC, region. The program is designed to restore the native plant communities that are essential to the region's ecological health. We help stabilize streams, control invasive alien plants, and restore forests, meadows, and wetlands. At the heart of the program is our Wild Plant Nursery, the region’s most comprehensive source of native plants propagated from wild seed.
All of our field work is designed for public participation, as a venue for environmental education. Check out our Field Schedule for upcoming volunteer events.
We also work with a wide range of institutional and corporate partners, including government agencies, companies that provide volunteer opportunities for their employees, landscaping firms, other nonprofits, and schools. Please contact us if you are interested in setting up a volunteer event for your organization.
Local-Ecotype, Native Plant Propagation:
We work closely with local, state, and federal agencies to propagate local-ecotype, native plants and to restore those plants to threatened habitat with a focus on protecting urban forests and engaging with the local community through volunteers, interns, and interaction with the public. Our Wild Plant Nursery is a unique resource for ecological restoration in the greater Washington region. It is also the heart of our operation. The Wild Plant Nursery is the most comprehensive source of local-ecotype plant material in the Washington DC region, and the region’s only facility dedicated exclusively to this type of propagation. Every year we propagate between 250-320 species, some of them rare in the wild in this region, and many of them in decline. We grow all our plants from seeds (or spores, in the case of ferns) that we collect from over 50 local natural areas. (We collect only with permission.) This ensures the local genetic diversity of our locally native plants are conserved. We supply over 55,000 local-ecotype native plants to projects on both public and private lands, reaching over one hundred parks and schools and hundreds of home gardens every year.
We rely on volunteers to run the nursery! To join us, check the Volunteer page for our Field Schedule.
Ecological Restoration:
The Earth Sangha’s own on-the-ground restoration program engages community members to assist in the removal of non-native invasive plants and to restore local-ecotype, native plants to public lands. We are currently involved in several long-term meadow, forest, and riparian restoration projects in partnership with Fairfax County. We also work with Arlington and Prince William Counties, the Cities of Alexandria and Falls Church, and the Town of Vienna on more short-term restoration projects.
We use local-ecotype native plants propagated at our Wild Plant Nursery in our own restoration projects, and in those of other land-management agencies in the DC region, both government and nonprofit. For example, in conjunction with Fairfax County Park Authority (FCPA) ecologists and botanists, we’re engaged in state- and globally-rare plant species conservation and reintroduction. To support the FCPA Invasive Management Area (IMA) program, we supply their restoration sites with local-ecotype native plants (including donations of plants to ensure restoration work can continue even when the County's budget is limited), perform site visits to advise on restoration activities, and host workshops for IMA Site Leaders to better educate them on restoring native plant communities. We’re also leading a bulk seed collection effort for the FCPA’s Landscape Legacy & Sustainability Program to restore local meadows.
Our connection to local schools is also crucial to our work. Annually, we work with dozens of schools to supply thousands of native plants to schoolyard native plant gardens. Access to the schools allows us to help students understand the landscapes in which they live. And in the aggregate, local schools control an enormous amount of land — land that we can help improve. By helping schools create educational native-plant displays on their grounds, we can reduce stormwater run-off, reduce carbon emissions from mowing, and expand habitat for the native plants and animals that can use the display gardens.
Growing Community:
Sangha is a Sanskrit term for community, so in addition to sharing our knowledge with our government and nonprofit partners, we think it is crucial to educate the public on how native plant conservation works in an urban-suburban setting. We consult with educators, homeowners, and other community members on selecting appropriate native plants to support grassroots restoration projects. Each year we work with around 1,500 community volunteers including local residents, students, Scout groups, religious organizations, and Master Gardeners and Naturalists. Volunteers help with the full range of our activities including all stages of native plant propagation at the Wild Plant Nursery, invasive plant removal on field sites, and replanting efforts. We work with volunteers who have never planted a single plant in their life to retired professionals looking to put their knowledge to work and everyone in between. Our goal is for each volunteer, whether they regularly join our work or volunteer a single time, to walk away with more knowledge of our natural areas. Our work provides opportunities for long-term involvement (we have volunteers who started volunteering with us over two decades ago) as well as more casual or even one-time involvement.
We’re proud to work with volunteers of all ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, creeds and faiths, ethnic backgrounds, sexual and gender orientations, regardless of experience.
Conservation Internships:
The Earth Sangha’s Conservation Internship program directly addresses a main issue in urban forest management and conservation in Virginia: the lack of a local pipeline to educate/train people for future work in on-the-ground conservation and restoration work. Through our Earth Sangha Conservation Internship program, we leverage our decades of experience to create a workforce pipeline to support crucial conservation and restoration needs across Virginia.
Our internship program offers two pathways: a full-year experience for college graduates, career-switchers, or part-time students; and a summer-only program designed for full-time students. Training includes hands-on experience in native plant identification; natural plant community identification; seed collection, handling, processing, and propagation; and ecological restoration techniques including invasive species management. Previous interns have gone on to find full-time employment in environmental restoration, native plant propagation, agriculture, sustainability, and landscape design across Virginia and nationwide as well as completing bachelor’s and master’s programs in biology, conservation, sustainability, and geographic information systems.
Plant Grants:
At the Earth Sangha, we ardently believe that everyone deserves access to high quality, wild areas. The Earth Sangha's Plant Grant program is designed to reach grassroots, restoration projects that have no or limited funds and would otherwise not be able to engage in restoration.
We select the sites based on which projects bring the greatest ecological benefits (we use datasets such as Tree Equity score, and the now-archived Federal tools such as CJEST to specifically target areas with environmental justice inequities) and social benefits (previous Plant Grant sites include multiple Title 1 schools and an affordable housing site). In addition to the ecological benefits, increased native plant cover, especially tree cover, reduces stormwater runoff, provides shade, and reduces urban heat islands. Replanting these areas with common, robust, and high-ecological-value native species will help to ensure the health of urban forests in the long-term.
Banner: Various native goldenrods draw monarch butterflies to a powerline meadow in Fairfax County, Virginia. Photo by Lisa Bright.
