Effort to restore endangered 'Goldilocks' plant to Kouchibouguac sees early success

Known as a Goldilocks plant, the Gulf of St. Lawrence aster is pretty particular about where it lives.

Conditions have to be "just right" for it to thrive and that means the people who are trying to save the endangered plant first have to figure out exactly how it likes its bed, so to speak.

"It grows where there's salt, but it doesn't tolerate too much," said David Mazerolle, a botanist who is working to protect the species at Kouchibouguac National Park, around 100 kilometres northeast of Moncton.

"And the plant also needs some kind of storm disturbance to come and wipe the slate clean of other species, because this is a plant that doesn't really compete very well with other kinds of vegetation. So you'll usually find it on shores that are almost just plain bare sand with not much else growing there. So places that were hit by storm waves."

And therein lies the problem. 

The aster, which is only found in a few sites in eastern New Brunswick, P.E.I. and the Magdalen Islands and nowhere else in the world, has proven to be very vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The two known populations in Kouchibouguac disappeared when a powerful storm hit the region in October 2000.

After a lot of searching over several years, scientists came to the conclusion it no longer existed inside the park's boundaries.

So, in 2016, they began the process of trying to reintroduce it.

That's not easy, especially considering it is not a perennial plant. Instead, it drops its seeds and dies.

"So the persistence of these populations really depends on the presence of new seed coming into the ground and that's what we usually refer to these things as — seed banks," Mazerolle said.

"And they are kind of what they sound like. It's just a bank of available healthy seed that remains in the soil that will be there just in case the right conditions come up for germination and growth."

The seeds for the restoration effort came from the University of Prince Edward Island, where botany professor Christian Lacroix has been studying the Gulf of St. Lawrence aster for years.

They then set about trying to find out exactly what this picky little relative of the dandelion and the daisy really likes. It was a steep learning curve.