Seed Germination Ecology of Hawaiian Montane Species: A Continuation of Efforts to Acquire, Organize, and Share Data to Facilitate Propagation and Restoration Efforts

Many Hawaiian montane plant community types and species have becomerare, and much restoration work is needed. However, growing the plants needed for restoration may be hampered by lack of infonnation on seed donnancy and gennination. We propose to continue developing a database for the classes of donnancy and for the donnancy breaking and gennination requirements in seeds of montane species; this will be made available to everyone. We will detennine the donnancy breaking and gennination requirements of seeds in at least one species in various families/genera for which little or no infonnation is available and continue studies on seeds with water-impenneable seed or fruit coats. For difficult-to-genninate penneable seeds, we will continue to develop the "movealong experiment" technique, and to facilitate this work soil temperature data will be collected in the field. Our goals are to provide new data on seed donnancy and gennination and to develop tools to aid in the propagation of native species from seeds.