The establishment-life history phase of many plants, including seed germination, is crucial to plant success. This is particularly important in the case of threatened foundational species, whose success is linked with ecosystem health. Understanding traits that impact germination success is necessary, as this is not well understood in many systems. Genome size is a trait that is known to affect phenotypic expression of plants in an ecosystem. However, the extent to which genome size affects germination success is unclear. Understanding these influences are of great importance to threatened ecosystems, including the threatened sagebrush steppe. Artemesia tridentata (Asteraceae), big sagebrush, is a vital shrub to ecosystems of western North America and occurs across a large range of environmental variation. Multiple species rely upon this shrub, some exclusively, for habitat and food throughout the seasons including the greater sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, and the pygmy rabbit. The sagebrush steppe ecosystem has been threatened by expanding rangeland, encroachment of competing vegetation, and most significantly, by fire incidence. Successful restoration of big sagebrush is of great importance to reestablishing sagebrush steppe ecosystems and protecting the wildlife of the region. Big sagebrush also includes individuals representing a large range in genome size and multiple ploidy levels. Our aim was to assess the influence of genome size on germination success of A. tridentata. We conducted a growth chamber experiment in which sagebrush seeds with varying parental genome sizes from 26 individuals from each of three locations across Idaho were germinated under identical conditions and the proportion of seeds germinated from each parent was assessed. Preliminary statistical analysis of these data show a significant interaction effect of genome size and site on germination proportion. This result suggests that the proportion of germination increases with genome size at different rates dependent on site, thus illustrating the importance of genome size on germination success.