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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!
 Legions of flagged plants at East Riley Abby and Taylor taking on Riley!
Here are some pictures I took of wild parsnip at RRX. The leaves are compound, fairly large, and have rough,toothed edges. The flowers are large, yellow, and flat-topped, kind of like a bigger, yellow version of Queen Anne’s Lace. The flowering stalks are thick, and can get pretty tall. However, not all the plants will be flowering, so make sure you know what the leaves look like! The foliage has oils that will make your skin incredibly sensitive to sunlight, so it can give you terrible blisters.
My first impression of this area was to wonder if it was actually a prairie remnant at all. All I could see was a ditch with lots of brome and Poa. There was a fence about 10 or 15 meters away from the tracks, beyond which the ground dipped down considerably. This seems to indicate that the area beyond the fence is an old field that has sunk due to plowing and soil erosion. Other than its higher surface, the only thing that immediately suggested to me that this site was a prairie was a couple of Rosa arkansana plants. The most common plants, however, were definitely brome, Poa, and wild parsnip. After a bit more observation, I noticed a couple more native plants: veiny pea and a Solidago species. There were a couple of trees growing in the area, a cottonwood and a juniper. Additionally, there were two large downed trees that looked like they had been lying there at least a year. I wonder if they fell due to a natural occurrence such as a windstorm, or if people cut them down as a management strategy. I thought that because it’s next to a railroad, it’s possible that this is native prairie, burned occasionally due to sparks from a passing train. However, the predominance of weedy, non-native plants and the lack of insect pollinators or other animals led me to think that this is a degraded site. I saw no Echinacea plants there. Although the area was larger than BTG, it still seemed small, perhaps too small for a reproducing population.
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