This tree-seed bank in Pierce County is crucial as wildfires worsen. Look inside

It smelled like Christmas inside the Silvaseed extractory Tuesday morning as machines whirred meticulously to remove millions of conifer seeds from cones and sort them into large barrels.

Hidden inside an unassuming complex in the small southwestern Pierce County city of Roy is the largest private tree-seed bank in the western United States. Here, about 5,000 pounds of seeds are collected every year and 6 to 10 million seedlings are sprouted every year in the field and five acres of greenhouses on site.

Silvaseed’s work is essential at a time when wildfires are becoming more frequent and more devastating as a result of climate change, as previously reported by the News Tribune. By gathering seeds from areas that are at high risk of fire, among other places, the company helps ensure forests in Washington, Oregon and beyond are regrown in a way that best enables them to survive, Silvaseed staff say.

Timber companies, tribes, public landowners and private landowners (including Christmas tree farmers) buy the seeds and seedlings grown by Silvaseed. Mast Reforestation, the parent company of Silvaseed, works directly with landowners and foresters to replant the trees.

To fund that costly restoration work, Mast leverages the credits that tech companies, shipping companies and airlines pay to offset their carbon footprints, said Grant Canary, the CEO and founder of Mast.

Forests are not naturally regenerating at the rate they have historically due to the scale and severity of wildfires in the last decade, Canary told the News Tribune. Studies from the Washington Department of Natural Resources show that as well. Those fires destroy the trees’ seeds, and the “snags” of trees left behind are not desired by lumber companies, so “there’s no revenue coming in to help the forest regenerate,” Canary said.

Typically landowners would burn snags to remove them, but another service Mast provides is burying them instead to keep the carbon in the trees from entering the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, thus contributing to global warming, Canary said.

“For a nursery, the advantage is getting to tap into this whole additional source of customers who are looking for carbon (offsets), who are looking for post-fire reforestation, because a lot of nurseries haven’t had the ability to really address that market in the past,” said Kea Woodruff, the Silvaseed general manager.

How does the seed processing work?

Silvaseed staff scout for cones in mid-spring and early summer, Woodruff said. Crews monitor the quality of the cones over the course of the season and in September and October they hire contractors to scale the trees, collecting green unopened cones to bring back to the processing center, she said.

Crews collect cones primarily from the top of the tree because they are more likely to be unopened and pollinated by a neighboring tree (which helps achieve maximum genetic diversity), Woodruff said. The company is also one of the only seed suppliers that still buys bushels of cones collected by people who find stashes of cones on the forest floor hidden by squirrels preparing for the winter, she said. There was a buyer station set up in Roy, but what cones Silvaseed collects each year and where they set up their buying stations varies from season to season depending on the frequency of mast events, Woodruff said.

A mast event happens when a tree produces an unusually large crop of seeds, which can happen once or twice a decade. Silvaseed staff track mast events around the Northwest to determine where they will send crews to harvest cones. Mast events have occurred more irregularly over the past decade, likely due to climate change, Woodruff said. More frequent wildfires means more trees are dying, and their seeds are burnt and lost, she said. More frequent drought and less predictable precipitation cycles impact seed production too.

In the 1990s in Washington, wildfires burned about 86,000 acres annually, but that number has grown significantly, according to data cited in a forest health and wildfires bill that passed the state Legislature in 2021. By the 2000s, that annual number had increased to 189,000 acres. Between 2016 and 2021 that grew to 488,000 acres burned. In 2021, 812,000 acres burned.

Woodruff said Silvaseed tries to collect seeds from everywhere because “obviously we cannot predict when and where fires are going to happen, and so just having a good collection of seed across species and across all geographies is really the best way to mitigate against fire impacts.”

Silvaseed primarily harvests cones from Washington and Oregon, but it also collects cones in Idaho and Montana, Woodruff said. This year Silvaseed processed a high volume of subalpine fir seeds, in addition to grand fir, noble fir, pacific silver fir, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and sugar pine seeds. It collected western red cedar cones near Roy and often collects cones from Mount Rainier National Park and the Capitol State Forest west of Olympia, she said.

After the cones are collected, they are heat-dried in various machines at the Silvaseed extractory. Then, other machines remove the coat and wings of the cones, sifting the material until only the seeds remain. Staff check the seeds’ viability with X-ray machines and ensure the seeds are clearly labeled throughout the process, so they know where the seeds came from, Woodruff said.

That meticulous labeling also ensures the seeds are planted at the correct sites and elevation they are genetically adapted for, so they are more likely to grow strong and survive, she said.

Once the seeds are extracted, they are either sold to customers or put in cold storage to be stored or germinated into seedlings that will be grown in the nursery and later planted.

“We live in a forested landscape, and if we want to continue to see forests in our landscape, then we need to be protecting them,” Woodruff said. “Because the climate is changing, that also means our landscape is changing, our species distribution is changing. And we want to be prepared for whatever those future conditions are going to be.”