Native plants for greening Mediterranean agroecosystems

In the upcoming United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a global challenge for scientists and practitioners will be to develop a well-functioning seed production sector on the basis of a sound species-selection process¹. To balance crop production with biodiversity functions in Mediterranean woody crops, agroecological practices² suggest the need to move towards the establishment of herbaceous ground covers^3-5. However, establishing such plants requires a supply of suitable native seeds, which is currently unavailable. Here, we present a comprehensive process for selecting regionally adapted species that also emphasizes considerations for seed production⁶. Using olive groves as a target system, we found that research on ground covers for regenerative agriculture has largely overlooked native species at the expense of commercial and ill-suited varieties. Our assessment of native annuals showed that 85% of the grasses and forbs evaluated exhibit a suite of ecological and production traits that can be tailored to meet the requirements of farmers, seed producers and environmental agencies. These findings suggest that many native species are neglected in agronomic research, despite being potentially suitable for ground covers and for supporting a nature-based solution⁷ in restoration practice. The framework used here may be applied in other agroecosystems to follow global greening initiatives and to support native seed production to scale up restoration^8-10.