Plants cultivated for ecosystem restoration can evolve toward a domestication syndrome.

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration calls for upscaling restoration efforts, but many terrestrial restoration projects are constrained by seed availability. To overcome these constraints, wild plants are increasingly propagated on farms to produce seeds for restoration projects. During on-farm propagation, the plants face non-natural conditions with different selection pressures, and they might evolve adaptations to cultivation that parallel those of agricultural crops, which could be detrimental to restoration success.