Local provenance plant seed and restoration: Scientific imperative or romantic diversion?

It is a widely held assumption that plants used in revegetation projects should be derived from "local provenance" seed. Throughout the last twenty years or so this notion has been a central tenet of the extension literature in government funded natural resource management programs such as Landcare. On the whole I believe this assumption is based on unjustified and tenuous interpretations on the related scientific literature. Indeed in the last five years or so some individuals and organizations have begun to acknowledge that poor or even over-excited interpretation of provenance research has stymied good operational practice for ecological restoration. It is hoped that we are now seeing the beginning of the end of a simplistic application of the phenomenon of provenance to the practice of restoration. Nonetheless an insistence on using "local" seed retains a dominant place in the thinking of many practitioners within the natural resource management sector, contributing, in my view, to wasted resources and poor conservation outcomes. In this paper I argue that attempts at defining provenance in terms of fixed geography are unnecessary, technically unfeasible, and ultimately non-scientific, and that habitat matching is a better approarch to identifying suitable sources of seed. I also attempt to use the discourse surrounding the promotion of provenance and local seed to address the broader idea of the relationship between culture, ecological knowledge and landscape-scale conservation "design". The practice of ecological restoration represents a cultural aspiration that inevitably results in the creation of new kinds of ecosystems no matter how ecologically stringent or scientifically objective our criteria and strategies appear to be. The provenance issue sheds light on the negative impact that poortly thought out ideas and approaches in applied ecology have to progress in achieving restoration goals. This is particularly the case wehre there is a failure to candidly acknowledge our role as active landscape designers and managers, and agents of landscape change.