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For his REU, Ben Lee designed an experiment to test different methods of seed collection and sorting on Galium boreale. In the 2015 fall burn unit of Hegg Lake WMA, he placed six square ten by ten meter plots around patches of Galium. Ben randomly selected three plots to be machine harvested and the other three plots were chosen to be hand harvested. Hand harvesting was conducted by two team members at one time whereas machine harvesting was done by one person using a modified STIHL Shredder Vac. After harvest, Ben randomly selected three plots for machine sorting and the other three for hand sorting. Machine sorting was done using the dockage tester at the Hoffman Grain Elevator and hand sorting was done by pushing seeds through a standard window screen to remove the duff. Ben found no significant difference in efficiency (g/min) between the two harvest methods but did find that machine sorting is significantly more efficient than sorting by hand.
 The team at Hegg, close to Ben’s plots Start year: 2015
Location: Hegg Lake WMA
Products: Ben wrote a report and created a poster that was presented at his school’s (St. Mary’s College of Maryland) summer research symposium. The poster can be found here.
For her RET project, Lea gathered data to study the relationship between flowering density and seed set. She worked at Staffanson Prairie Preserve, which appears to have higher flowering density in burn years than non-burn years. This year, 2015, was a non-burn year. Lea and Team Echinacea kept track of the style persistence of about 50 individuals for which we have seed set information from prior burn years. These individuals were harvested and their achene count and seed set will be assessed in winter 2016 by Gordon Younkin, an undergraduate intern from Northwestern University. Gordon will work to build a model of seed set in Staffanson in a non-burn year and aims to compare this model to a burn year.
Site: Staffanson Prairie Preserve
Start year: 1996
Location: Staffanson Prairie Preserve
Overlaps with: phenology in remnants, phen for aii
Products: Lea is developing a dataset and lesson plan for high-school students to compare individual plants’ style persistence in burn years and non-burn years to test hypotheses about seed set in high- and low- flowering density. This lesson will introduce students to R and its use in data management and statistical analysis.
Read other flog posts about this experiment.
For his REU research project, Will is investigating heritability of flowering phenology in experimental plot 2 (p2), which was planted in 2006 with 3961 individuals selected for extreme (early or late) flowering phenology. This summer Will and Team Echinacea monitored the phenology of all 646 flowering plants (1216 individual heads) in p2, as well as the phenology of their parents in p1. Flowering in p2 began on the 4th of July and ended on August 26th. The peak day of flowering was July 27th when 1018 heads were flowering. The average duration of flowering for a head was 12.1 days. It was a huge year for flowering in p2 with nearly 5 times more heads than 2014 and over 16 times more than 2013. Will is comparing the flowering schedules of the p2 plants with the 2005 phenology records of their parents. As the plants in p2 mature, and perhaps flower more frequently, we will continue to gather data on family lines of Echinacea to discern the genetic component of their flowering phenology.
Many flags indicate many flowering plants in experimental plot 2 Start year: 2006
Location: Experimental plot 2 (Hegg Lake WMA)
Overlaps with: phenology in experimental plots
Products: The 2015 phenology records from p2 will be added to the existing multi-year ExPt2 phenology dataset. Will is using tools from the R package echPhenology developed by Team Echinacea to analyze and produce visualizations of the flowering schedule observed in p2. He plans to present his findings at a conference in spring or summer 2016.
 2015 flowering schedule of all heads in p2: First day of flowering was July 4th, peak was July 27th, and the last day was August 26th.
Read previous posts about this experiment.
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