August 2009 « The Echinacea Project

Teaching about prairie remnants

Hello,
I made it to the fourth day of school without taking my class outside to the nearest prairie remnant (the hill above the river in town)
It took very little time for them to learn to recognize ech. deadheads and rosa arkansana (rose hips). Some were even able to find basal ech. plants. (without offering 6-packs of pop as bait)

Hegg Lake 2009

Thank you all for your hard work when we measured my Hegg Lake common garden a week back. It was by far the fastest the Hegg garden was ever measured and there were no rechecks besides can’t finds! Below is some information regarding the Hegg garden.
Total plants planted in May 2006: 3,945
Number alive in August 2006: 3,699 (94%)
Number alive in August 2007: 3,320 (84%)
Number alive in August 2008: 3,008 (76%)
Number alive in August 2009: 2,834 (72%)

As you can see the length of the longest leaf actually decreases from 2008 to 2009. However, there were way more plants with multiple rosettes this year than in years past. I think the leaf length decreased because last year there was so much duff on the ground that the petioles of the leaves grew really long. The plants definitely looked healthy this year after the spring burn than they did last year. What was really exciting was I had my first flowering plant this year in row 7 position 44! Below is a picture of that flowering plant, and one of everyone measuring at Hegg.

Also, thank you to everyone in the town hall for being so hospitable to my dad, Oscar, and me. We had a great week and except my weird heat rash (it eventually went away) it was a lot of fun. Best of luck with the final push at the end of the season!
Regards,
Jennifer, Oscar, and John

done flowering

Echinacea plants on our transect at Staffanson Preserve are done shedding pollen for the year. A few still have persistent, receptive styles, but August 18th was the last day pollen was shed.

This graph show how many heads (left panels) or plants (right panels) finished on each day. The earliest heads finished on 15 July. I divided the preserve according to the burn unit: burned East (top panels) and unburned West (bottom panels):

Final date of flowering for 393 heads on 161 Echinacea plants
from a burned and unburned unit of a prairie preserve

This graph is based on preliminary, raw data, but I wanted to share. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of the graph.

Halverson Data, Head harvesting, and Landfill species list (in progress)

DATA

Here is a copy of my excel file with all my data. The sheet labeled corrected data for analysis is the file with all the data for each treatment. The sheet labeled baggins has a list of all the heads I used that need to be harvested, this was also posted in a separate post called “Baggins.” The ones labeled “donor” do not need to be harvested but should not be expected to have high seed set as they were bagged for most of their flowering time.

Pollination interference data (data entry 2).xls

HARVESTING

I need all of the heads used in my project (the ones that are painted) to be harvested in egg cartons (located in the shelf above the sink in the Hjelm house). Please label the compartment of the egg carton with the row, pos and tt color of the head. The egg cartons should be packed so that they wont be disturbed during travel and please be careful with the heads so no seeds fall out! Gretel has a list of all the heads to be harvested and its posted on the flog in July (“Baggins”). Please mail the packaged heads to: 119 School Street, Keene, NH 03431

LANDFILL SPECIES

I have been collecting plants at Landfill this season and have started to compile a list of the plants I have either seen or collected there. If Megan and anyone else would like to add plants to that list that would be great! Or check my identification. This list is very rough at the moment but I will continue to update it as I get more plants identified.

Species list landfill 2009.xls

Stipa is done (and so am I!)

Just a quick note to say that Stipa planting was completed by lunch on Wednesday. We were able to plant the vast majority of seeds where they were randomly assigned in the CG, 10 cm north of existing Echinacea positions on the whole meter throughout the garden. I think only two seeds were not planted at all; one was lost off the board and one was missing its awn and ID sticker. About a dozen seeds had to be assigned new locations, either because there was a hole or a rock in the way or because the plant/staple/can’t find flag that we were measuring from could not be located. Not bad! To assign new random positions, I simply grabbed an ID sticker from the sheet of leftover, unused positions, removed the old sticker, stuck the new and marched around the garden planting the last of my legacy to the Echinacea project. The final task will be to replace the can’t find flags that are associated with a Stipa seed with short pins. Hopefully, this will up the chances of finding seedlings next summer. To this end, we also put a toothpick 1 cm north of every seed. Best of luck to the crew put to this test!
Also, sadly, my time with Team Echinacea is coming to a close. I have accepted an offer for an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship to work at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC starting September 1st (gasp, so soon!). I will be working in their environmental risk assessment group, spending MUCH more time at a desk and much less time running around in the field. I hope that my knowledge and skills as a scientist can do some good in the policy world. Thanks for a wonderful year, and a particularly wonderful summer. Stay in touch.

Searching Caroline’s Hegg Lake Plot

We searched for seedlings in Caroline’s Hegg Lake plot today. Old and new seedlings were found. Here are the data:
Nextgenresc-19 Aug 09data.xls

sites and ID’s pollinator comp 09

Howdy gang!
Here’s the list of tag ID’s and corresponding letters at the sites used this summer. We flagged different plants on 7/13 and 7/6 and used the same plants for observations on 7/21 and 7/23. For some reason I can’t find the list of flagged plants for 7/13, so it would be great if someone could check on the Hjelm house computer for that info. It may or may not be in the folder for this experiment. I’m sure I compiled that info from the visor memos, but I don’t have the file on my computer.
ech flagged plants and tags.doc
We recorded the tag ID’s during FNC so we could go back and check to make sure we had recorded the right number, but we never made the check.
Here’s the file that lists whether the vial had a bee, fly, bfly, or beetle in it:
ECH poll obs ALL.xls
Here’s the FNC Data in an excel file:
ECH FNC.xls

I hope everything’s going well in MN! It sounds like lots of progress has been made since I left. I thought my poster presentation went pretty well back in Chi-town. The final version of it is in a previous flog post. Thanks again to everyone…I certainly could not have done this without all of your help. I hope the field season ends well. Keep in touch. Oh and here’s an interesting paper I came across recently: brown bj loosestrife comp.pdf
And I really like this picture Daniel took:

And here’s Echinacea taking center stage at CBG:

Seedling re-finds

Here is a draft version of a protocol for seedling re-finds in the prairie remnants. Please read and critique. Protocol for seedling refinds 2009.docx

Diedre and Jake’s posters

I wanted to share Diedre and Jake’s REU posters with everyone…they both did a great job!
Poster-DRfinal.pdf
JJF Poster-final.pdf

Pollinating Cirsium

Here’s what needs to be done tomorrow, around 10am, for pollinating Cirsium altissimum at Hegg Lake.

I will provide a clipboard with a data sheet, map, and pollinating tools. Plant numbers are on flags to the south of the plants. Plant 9-7 has a yellow twist-tied head that is flowering right now. It will need to be selfed. Yellow tt heads on plants 9-16,-6, and -8 may be flowering tomorrow. If so, they also need to be selfed. Plant 9-19 had two bagged yellow heads. One is done flowering, the other may be flowering tomorrow. If the second one is flowering, it should be selfed. 9-26 with a red tt may be flowering. If so, it needs to be crossed. Cross pollen can be obtained from 9-14, which has a white tt and is blooming now, or 9-21, which may be flowering tomorrow.

To pollinate the heads, use a q-tip provided. For selfing, just rub the q-tip over the anthers to collect the pollen, then brush the q-tip on the stigmas. The pollen is very sticky and will easily stick to the q-tip. For crossing, rub a q-tip on the anthers of a pollen donor (white tt). Place in a labeled glass vial, transport to the head to be crossed, and rub the stigmas with the q-tip. Be sure to write down which plant was used as a pollen donor.

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Experiments