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30 June: Phenology, flagging, and a finicky GPS signal

It was a busy day for Team Echinacea! We started out by spending the morning working on phenology, which is in full swing this week. By dividing and conquering, we were able to visit the plants at half of our sites. While the majority of the plants are still in the “bud” stage, we are starting to see lots of flowering–I even saw my first shriveled style at Riley! After lunch, the team split up. Amy took Lea and I back to Riley and taught us to shoot points with the GPS units, while the rest of the team headed to Hegg Lake to flag both the P2 experiment and some invasive Echinacea pallida plants. Lea got the hang of the procedure very quickly, shooting almost a hundred points! I, however, had struggle after struggle with Chekov, which lost its connection as soon as we got to East Riley despite my valiant efforts at troubleshooting. Hopefully my next experience doing GPS will go more smoothly!

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Legions of flagged plants at East Riley

Abby and Taylor taking on Riley!

Abby and Taylor taking on Riley!

June 29: a day of phenology

Today was a productive day for Team Echinacea! We started the day by heading into the remnants and flagging every possible Echinacea that we could find. Our group was visited by Amy Dykstra who helped us in finding many newly flowering plants.

The Search for Echinacea

Amy, Taylor, and a sea of flowering Echinacea.

Amy gave us a talk on her dissertation as well as on the groundbreaking new Aster analysis that she’s working on. It was an exciting day for the team and we currently have more than 1200 flowering heads flagged.

June 28: Water from the sky and the brush

After Lea’s flog post last night it began to rain, extremely hard. Being the nature lovers we are, we decided to hang out on the front porch and watch the rest of the storm come in to town. There was a beautiful break in the clouds which produced wonderful views of various layers of clouds with beautiful colors. The rain then came down harder and harder. Then, a wonderful idea gripped us all. We ran out from the cover that our stoop provided us and began dancing and splashing in the rain! It was some of the most fun we’ve had yet!

The beautiful clouds from last nights storm

The beautiful clouds from last nights storm

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Having some fun in the rain!

This morning started slow with some blank stares into the refrigerator while attempting to decipher the answer to the questions of breakfast, life, the universe, and everything. Everyone eventually came to a conclusion on the first (and most important) item. Personally I cooked up a nice three egg omelet. The morning was lazy but we ended up heading over to Elk Lake for some good times on the water! While we were there Gina pulled out her water colors and decided to teach some of us to learn how to paint! I got to do water colors for the first time since probably fifth grade which gave me a whole new perspective on the endeavor. I was able to accurately represent what, if you squint hard enough, looks like an artistic version of Elk Lake. Gina on the other hand painted a detailed masterpiece of Elk Lake. The trees look like trees and the grasses look like grasses! We then went swimming and returned to the town hall to have multiple variations on the classic dish rice and beans. It’s been a great second week and I am looking forward to the next few weeks as Echinacea begins to flower!

Gina and Ali painting with water colors beside Elk Lake

Gina and Ali painting with water colors on the shores of Elk Lake

Hawkweed Progress

Last summer several members of Team Echinacea began an experiment to determine the best way to eradicate Hawkweed from p1. Elizabeth, Cam, Allison, and Jared randomly assigned five treatments for removing Hawkweed in 16 1mx1m plots: 1. Hand pull, without tools, hawkweed basal leaves and flowers with the intent of removing as much root as possible (hand pull, no tool) 2. Hand pull with a tool with the intent of removing as much root as possible (hand pull w/tool) 3. Paint one leaf of each rosette with a 2:1 round-up herbicide solution with red dye (paint leaves) 4. Cut the flower head off of each hawkweed plant, paint 2:1 round-up herbicide solution with red dye on peduncle (cut head, paint stem). The 5th treatment was a control, where there was no effort to remove Hawkweed.

This summer, I revisited the plot where this experiment took place to observe how the Hawkweed looked after 1 year. I visually estimated percent cover in each plot, and am excited to compare the results from this year with data from last year to see how various treatments affect hawkweed presence after a year.

Hawkweed 2015 experimental plot 1

Elk-bow Lake and Ribfest

Today I swam in a lake for the first time, a lake that Katherine thought was called Elkbow Lake which caused her to wonder why there would be both an Elkbow Lake and an Elbow Lake. But in reality, I swam in Elk Lake. This was after a surprise pancake breakfast cooked by Danny. We had banana pancakes, chocolate chip pancakes, plain pancakes, and banana-chocolate chip pancakes, all with REAL maple syrup. Breakfast happened around 10:30am. Lake swimming began around noon. All in all we spent a few hours in the sun. We laid out towels, tried to avoid the kids with water guns, and swam out to the little dock that had a diving board. The diving board warned us to “plan our dives” before attempting, and also mentioned that it had a weight capacity of 250 lbs. While the majority of the group continuously jumped, flipped, and dove off the dock, I tended to stay in the water. I enjoy treading water so I did that most of the time we were in the lake. Later in the afternoon we headed back to town hall to shower up and get ready for our trip to Alex. After showers, a little primping, and a set of “normal” clothes (no CBG shirt?) we headed off to two different destinations in Alex. One car headed to Taco John’s and the grocery store, one headed to RIBFEST! You can tell which car I was in. We met up with Will and ate some ribs, cheese curds, grilled corn, and kettle corn. As the clouds rolled in we decided to wrap up the night. While driving back to K-town the rain started, lightening and all. Now, I’m ending the night in town hall with some peppermint tea and a pleasantly full stomach. Good Saturday!

Just SOME of our rib-remnants…we definitely ate more than this!

Just SOME of our rib-remnants…we definitely ate more than this!

Ribfest entrance, notice the sign is in ALL CAPS

Ribfest entrance, notice the sign is in ALL CAPS

26 June: Flowering season begins!

Today marks our second Friday of the summer field season and also the beginning of flowering season for Echinacea. We spent the day working in teams to track phenology in the remnants, and found that several plants have already started producing pollen. Woohoo!

Gina records the status of plants at East Riley.

Gina records the status of plants at East Riley.

We can estimate how many days a plant has been flowering because Echinacea florets  follow a specific pattern of development:

On the first day of flowering, anthers emerges from above the bract that subtends (or supports) the floret. The anther is the male, pollen-producing part of the flower. Flowering occurs from the outermost florets of the Echinacea heads and moves inwards; on the first day of flowering, only florets in the outer ring of florets will produce anthers. On the second day of flowering, styles (the female, pollen-receiving part of the plant) emerge from the florets that had anthers the day before. Also, florets in the second row of florets could start producing anthers. On the following day, these florets will have their styles emerge, and the pattern continues.

Today we learned how to identify anthers and styles. We caught most of the flowering plants on their first or second day of flowering, but we estimated that some of them had already begun 3 or 4 days ago based on the number of rows that had already had anthers and styles.

Here's a plant on it's first day of flowering. The blue arrow points at an anther.

Here’s a plant on it’s first day of flowering. The light blue arrow points at an anther.

Matt’s wife, Melinda, and the Brazilian exchange student that they are hosting, Thiago, ate lunch with us and brought a strawberry pie with cool-whip and blueberries. Yum!! And then at the end of the day Hattie and Per brought out a surprise treat for us! It was an original recipe: ginger-stuffed marshmallows coated in chocolate and rolled in graham crackers and ginger. How lucky are we??

Scrumptious delicacies courtesy of Hattie and Per!

Scrumptious delicacies courtesy of Hattie and Per! Yum!

We ended a little early today because we were scared off by a little rain and ominous-looking storm clouds rolling in from the west. It turned out that we didn’t get much of the storm and we went swimming in Elk Lake after work.

 

 

 

 

 

25 June, Sweet Clover, GPS, and Independent Projects

Our second Thursday got off to a strong start as we finished pulling sweet clover from p8. Last night’s rain meant prime clover-pulling conditions: wet and loose soil that allowed us to extract the full tap roots of the tenacious plants from the ground. Danny provided some a cappella background tunes to keep us moving through this herculean task. Despite the wet soil, there were still quite a few plants that were able to put up a good fight. Flexing my sore hands at the end of the hour or so we spent in p8, I relished the sight of all the pulled clover laid out to parch in the sun. P8 is now sweet clover free! (At least for now.)

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The Team lays out sweet clover pulled from p1 to dry in the sun.

After pulling the clover we had time before lunch for a lesson in using GPS to map plants and help out with Echinacea demography. Stuart had started the day by checking the space weather–apparently a solar flare just missed us, very luckily leaving us in the clear to proceed with the Team’s two GPS machines (affectionately named Sulu and Chekov).

Using GPS to stake Echinacea plants!

Using GPS to stake Echinacea plants!

At lunch a few of us gave quick presentations about our summer project proposals, which have already made a lot of progress in the two weeks since we arrived! Some of the questions we’ll be attempting to answer this season include how aphids affect Echinacea fitness, how hybrid and native plants differ in fitness, which seed collecting methods are the most effective for species co-flowering with brome, and whether flowering phenology is heritable. Finally we got the chance to hear from professor Ruth Shaw about some of the latest work being done on analyzing the genetics of fitness in Echinacea (and other species as well!).

After this jam-packed morning, the Team got some down time to work on individual projects. I look forward to watching everyone’s research progress!

 

 

A Visitor

Today was a great day! We did some flagging in a few plots and also got a chance to meet Jennifer Ison via videochat. We also got a chance to speak with Stuart regarding our independent projects… In the midst of waiting for our appointments with Stuart, Ali was visited by this butterfly. It’s a Pearl Crescent Butterfly (Phyciodes tharos). Soon it’ll be stopping at some flowering Echinacea, but today we definitely enjoyed its visit on Ali.

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23 June, Head Hunters

We took advantage of this sunny and beautiful Tuesday by visiting some more of the remnant prairie sites! In the morning we visited “On 27” an aptly named site bordering highway 27 that is a haven for Echinacea. We were able to practice tagging plants with heads to note the ones we can expect to flower this summer. This task was especially exciting because it allows for a preview of what the rest of the summer will look like. We will be frequent visitors to the plants that flower this summer in order to study flowering phenology. To characterize this trait, we will note the time that pollen is present for the first and the last times on the head. “On 27” had many heads scattered atop the hill, and down either side to the cornfields which surrounded the remnant prairie. We visited several other sites before lunch, tuning our “Echinacea eyes” and discerning between different stages of flower development. After lunch, we split into three groups to visit more sites. It appears that “Riley” site will be a popular destination this summer, there were many heads with emerging rays that were 1cm or longer! To the layperson (ie: me before I was a member of Team Echinacea) the rays are what you might call a petal— they are the pale purple florets that elegantly drape from Echinacea’s spiny center. Seeing longer rays is a sign that we will visit soon so as not to miss the first pollen. Among the sites that I visited in the afternoon, were the two sites that Matt and I explored last week for our “first impressions” outing! Returning to these sites serves as a reminder of how much I have come to understand about the beautiful purple coneflower in only a week.

Small ray florets at Riley

Small ray florets at Riley

Longer Florets at Riley

Longer Florets at Riley

22 June, Pulling Sweet Clover

Today we started in P8 by pulling some sweet clover.  It was not a task to be taken lightly, only the heartiest could master the “full pull.”  It was really in the ground and being held tight by Brome grass. We did manage to pull on and get a lot pulled out and removed. Hopefully there will be a lot less in the plot from now on. Below is a picture of our bundles.  We figured they were at least as big or bigger than Gina!  We broke for lunch and then started flagging in P1 and at Hegg lake. We were all getting quite good at finding plants and/or staples and almost had all the 5 meter flagging done when a sudden, unexpected rain shower left us running for cover!

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