I've maybe got a great business idea for anybody who wants it...

Good idea or not?

This is a service business to help both you AND parks to generate revenue to maintain wild plant biodiversity in parks - something that you can do to help wildlife AND make a lot of money with. It is transplanting business and a lot of parks and land are poorly maintained and some lands are lacking biodiversity in both plants and animals. So theres a need here...


Heres the ideas: with proper licencing

Charge a service to the park for transplanting SOME of a wild plant to another location in the park

Parks sell a wild plant, you dig SOME of it up, and then you transplant them to another park near by.

Parks sell you SOME of the seeds, you spread them around in another place in park/parks.

 

Not to completely negate your idea, Scott, but here are a few thoughts I have on this.

You're in Florida, as am I. Both the US and Canada have a lot of regulations about what can be transplanted and under what circumstances. We have city, state/provincial/ and federal lands, sometimes county, sometimes a few other designations. Reservations, grandfathered tracts, potentially historic or archaeological sites, riparian, reclaimed, watershed... and on and on. Coordinating among some of these would be difficult. Probably some would be easy enough.

As a private citizen offering to transplant a public park's assets to another spot in the same park, you would probably have to submit proposals and bids and show a history and success rate of doing the same type of work. If you started out by being the forester for a specific park and did this sort of thing, that could be a launching pad but could also be a conflict of interest.

I have actually done the 'dig some up with permission and transplant to another park with permission' thing. The people with my Florida Native Plant Society chapter were invited by the international airport to visit their remote area future expansion site, and invited to transplant to a privately owned garden attraction, which we did. In both sites we had someone on the critical permission granting boards, and weeks of planning. It also was a quarter century ago.

I love the concept of guerrilla gardening with seed balls, but can tear that idea to pieces with all the potential problems it can create. It would be orders of magnitude worse with actually doing this on spec or via contract. Imagine all the documentation for where you sourced the wild seeds, or how you would guarantee their viability or disease resistance. If you spread some lovely native plant seed in some areas, can you identify the geology and hydrology and twenty year cycles of that area, will the new plants adversely affect flora, fauna, weather, run-off, disease vectors, etc.?

As a business proposition, the materiel providers and the recipients both have boards they have to satisfy, and regulations they have to keep. You would have to proceed carefully with a business plan and do a ton of research. And I suspect that being a forester or landscaper for a park would help tremendously.

 

Ok ive recently read that for some endangered species, transplanting doesnt work and they need specific environments.

But for native plants, spread the idea to anybody you know in the wildlife conservation field and see what they think.

We need natural park landscaping in our econony. Too many people are sitting on their ass being consumers working sedentary jobs and not working helping out the environment, when we should all be stewards of the land, which we are all failing at miserably. Natural park landscaping would be a great b2b industry to work with that would definitely create more jobs, raise revenue for parks and nature reserves, and promote nature biodiversity.

IMHO, there are two ways to go about conservation:

1: be reactive - wait until a species becomes endangered, and then respond with protection and survellience

Or 2: be proactive - transplant plants seed them and spread them around so endangerment never happens.

 

Even highly trained and educated foresters and other biota researchers and careerists are often guilty of missing some key items. Can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. I have scads of coontie (Zamia floridana) in my yard, most of it seeded in situ by me from locally sourced cones. Wonderful, right? But the somewhat rare Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala) that lays her eggs exclusively on this genus, and in Florida on this species only, does not live in my area. Not even close. I've passed saturation with my coontie even though the terrain and the microclimate is right for it, and it's not even that beneficial. I could plant a few of the berry bushes that are highly touted for native yards here, but I don't have the fauna to appreciate them. (Okay, I actually do have many suitable fruit bearing shrubs for wildlife, and the opossum and raccoon and woodpecker families seem to enjoy them... But no deer, no gopher tortoises, no rabbits, and the squirrels are spoiled and lazy.)

On a plant rescue trip looking for a Habenaria orchid, we had to caution our eager volunteers that they were stepping on Drosera and Sarracenia. Once we identified those, volunteers wanted to dig them up, too. For what purpose? Would they have the right microenvironment to allow them to flourish? I actually have known carnivorous plant Amateurs who did provide the right water chemistry and substrate, but it's not like those plants would have proliferated in suburbia.

It's easy to be enthusiastic about biodiversity and conservation, but it's challenging to understand all that goes into it. Even native plants can be introduced into the wrong environment and do damage there. I once planted a black mangrove in a frequently flooded area as a passive aggressive statement to the building management that kept replacing the Ilex cassine that would die from root rot. The lawn care company continued to trim around it for several years. Inland. Not even brackish water. There was a drainage ditch that the alligators used as a highway to the large lake across the road. If my mangrove had fruited and spread throughout the area, that would have been a great example of good plant, bad environment. Oh, it froze so potential problem averted.

Sorry for the rambling, but this is a topic that bears consideration at length. I guess I am more of a guerilla gardener afterall.