About this book:

"Climate-Resilient Native Plants" offers a comprehensive guide to adapting landscapes to the challenges of a warming world through the strategic selection and management of native species. The book emphasizes that resilience is not about stasis, but about a landscape's capacity to absorb shocks, maintain essential functions, and reorganize in the face of warming temperatures, extreme weather, and altered disturbance regimes. It moves beyond simple plant lists to focus on functional traits—such as rooting depth, water-use efficiency, phenological flexibility, fire adaptations, and tolerance to flooding and salinity—that allow plants to survive and thrive under various forms of stress.

A central theme is the dynamic interplay between plants and their environment, including the critical role of soil health, microbiomes, and mycorrhizal partnerships in buffering stress. The book also delves into complex topics like genetic diversity, local adaptation, and controversial strategies such as climate-smart provenancing and assisted migration. These interventions aim to introduce genetic variation or move species to new locations to match future climatic conditions, while carefully weighing the ecological and ethical risks against the perils of inaction. It stresses that robust design often involves creating diverse plant communities with staggered responses to spread risk across different stress scenarios.

The book applies these principles to diverse contexts, from the extreme conditions of urban heat islands, compacted soils, and pollution to the working landscapes of rural fields, forests, and rangelands, and specialized green infrastructure like bioswales and living shorelines. It provides practical guidance on establishment under extremes, water-wise irrigation, and maintenance strategies, including pruning and the deliberate use of fire, to foster long-term resilience. The final chapters broaden the discussion to include the crucial roles of equity, culture, Indigenous knowledge, and supportive policy frameworks in creating landscapes that are not only ecologically sound but also socially just and enduring.

Ultimately, "Climate-Resilient Native Plants" argues for a paradigm shift in how we approach landscape design and management. It moves away from rigid blueprints and toward an adaptive, observational, and community-engaged process that treats landscapes as living experiments. By integrating scientific understanding with local knowledge and historical context, the book empowers practitioners to create dynamic, diverse, and place-appropriate plant communities that can absorb shocks, adapt, and continue to provide vital ecosystem services, beauty, and cultural meaning in an uncertain future.

What You'll Find Inside:

• Understanding plant resilience traits: Learn how root strategies, leaf morphology, phenological plasticity, and functional adaptations (drought/flood/fire tolerance) determine native plants' capacity to withstand climate extremes.
• Climate-informed selection methods: Discover how to interpret climate projections, assess local impacts, and use tools like climate-smart provenancing and assisted gene flow to match plant genetics to future conditions.
• Site-specific design approaches: Explore how to match native species to urban heat islands, rural working lands, coastal zones, and other landscapes by analyzing microclimates, soils, hydrology, and disturbance regimes.
• Building climate-ready communities: Master techniques for designing diverse plant portfolios with complementary traits, rooting depths, and phenologies that create functional redundancy and adaptive capacity.
• From establishment to long-term care: Get practical guidance for planting under extremes, water-wise management, maintenance strategies, monitoring, and adaptive stewardship to ensure resilience over decades.

Who's It For:

This book is designed for landscape planners, urban foresters, municipal officials, restoration ecologists, professional landscapers, and serious gardeners who are working to create resilient landscapes in the face of climate change. It will be particularly valuable for professionals involved in urban greening projects, rural land management, coastal restoration, and green infrastructure design who need science-based, practical guidance for selecting and managing native species. The book also serves Indigenous land stewards, community organizers, and policymakers seeking to integrate ecological resilience with cultural values and equity considerations.