Welcome to Climate-Smart Native Plant Tools (C-SNaP tools)
This website aims to serve restoration ecologists, landscape professionals, and home gardeners interested in identifying and locating plants that support ecosystem function and are likely to persist with climate change. Our tools focus on the northeastern U.S. from Kentucky to Maine with informational resources that may be relevant more broadly. Our work is led by members of the Spatial Ecology Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in collaboration with the Northeast Regional Invasive Species & Climate Change Network with support from the USGS Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Why native plants?
Native plants, defined as species historically found growing without human intervention in a given location, provide substantial ecological benefits including increasing the abundance of native birds and pollinators (learn more here and here). Native plants are also far less likely to cause ecological harm than species introduced from other continents (learn more).
Looking for sources of native plants? Try searching for vendors through directories here, here, here, or here. Or if you're looking specifically for nurseries that sell only native plants sourced from local/regional genotypes, find those here.
Why climate-smart?
On their own, native species are moving much too slowly to 'keep up' with the rapid pace of climate change (learn more). To build ecological resilience to climate change, ecologists have suggested use of warm-adapted genotypes over local genotypes and planting warm-adapted plants beyond the margins of their historical ranges (learn more).
Climate-Smart Plant Selection Tool
Discover climate-smart plants suitable for your state and hardiness zone. Filter by plant characteristics, growth requirements, and climate tolerance to find species that will thrive in your local conditions now and under future climate conditions.
Climate-Adjusted Provenancing Tool
Identify potential seed sources for a restoration project. This tool identifies potential seed or plant sourcing locations for target native species based on current and future climate projections at a user-defined location. It also identifies plant species of multiple functional types likely to occur there as climate warms.