(light music) - For me, it's like a giant puzzle.

And you won't have all the pieces, but you look for the hints and you try to put together all these little suggestions about the right moisture and the right plants and the right aspect and the right elevation.

Earth is changing.

Our climate is changing.

The habitats are changing so fast right now that the plants can't keep up with themselves.

(light music) (wind whooshing) Going into a tight space here.

Come on in.

This is the only seed bank in Washington state, and this is a collection of rare, native species of Washington.

We have 148 species represented in the seed bank with around 900,000 seeds.

(light music) The purpose of this collection is really a safeguard against extinction of these species.

Society has had a tremendous impact on the natural world, and we have impacted an extensive amount of land, destroyed habitat, introduced non-native species, and some plants have lost 95% of their habitat.

If you have a rare species that occurs nowhere else in the world, or if it occurs on a particular unique habitat, the environment of that habitat is likely gonna change with climate change.

So the Wenatchee Mountains Checkermallow is a very narrowly distributed, endemic species to the Wenatchee Mountains found only in the Leavenworth area, and nowhere else in the world.

Some of the work we're doing with this species is working to improve its habitat at its native populations, as well as try to introduce new populations to make sure the species can survive at protected sites for generations to come.

(light music) I just see a tremendous amount of hope and possibility for the future that if we should really start to lose these species, we really will have the opportunity to reintroduce 'em, move 'em, you know, figure out what to do.

So I'm just pulling out some flagging so we can mark some plants.

And then this is a PVC square for doing cover estimates where we do counting all the different species that are growing with the Checkermallow.

(light music) Pretty beautiful, huh?

(laughs) This is an amazing sight.

It is so special, it is so beautiful.

It's nothing else like it in the Cascades that I'm aware of.

(light music) So this is the Checkermallow right here, and we're seeing a lot of insect damage this year, which is interesting.

So they don't stand out.

Sometimes there's just a field of pink when these are in bloom, but this year it's pretty dry for them.

Almost all the flowers have dried up and not gonna flower.

They're struggling.

This plant, as far as we know, has to flower to produce seeds.

And, of course, that's the way that population persists.

This is a much smaller flowering spike than what we would typically see.

It's very condensed, so it's very short.

In a really lush year, the flowering stem might have flowers starting here and going up maybe even six inches.

And the flowers are about half the size as what they usually are.

(walkie beeps) Hello, I'm here.

Is that you, Danielle?

(walkie beeps) - [Danielle] This is Danielle.

We're headed over to Transect 12 now.

(light music) - So we're going down the length of the transect and putting a flag right next to every plant we find that is flowering, or was flowering but got browsed by the elk.

And we're seeing a lot of that in here.

And this is a way for us to count the total number of plants in the transect, and keep track of which plants we've counted and which ones we haven't.

So all the conservation activities are focused on improving the habitat for the remaining populations, and then also trying to identify new places where we can introduce populations.

We really need to think about sites that can provide that late-season moisture, which means, where's the snow pack gonna be?

And the snow pack is likely gonna be better at higher elevation sites.

(light music) So, we're at 4,000 feet, a little over 4,000 feet, in the Wenatchee Mountains.

This site is a thousand feet higher than where the natural populations occur.

So we can try to capture a deeper snow pack that'll hopefully lead to later-season moisture, which we think this plant needs to be successful.

(light music) If we're successful and I saw an established population here that had been producing new plants and thriving, that would be an incredible legacy.

If I could do that, that would be a rich reward to a lot of years of hard work, and a lot of uncertainty.

I wanna just make sure that the next generation is here.

(light music)