Team Echinacea has begun the annual census of Echinacea plants. Each year we census all flowering plants at over 30 prairie sites. Each plant gets a digital census record, a flag, and a tag. Most plants already have a tag, so we don’t give them a new one. But some have lost their tag or are flowering for the first time, so they need a new tag. New tags this year are numbered starting at 30,001. Plants get neon flags and we will come back and survey them so we can make a map of the location of every plant. Once they get surveyed, we replace the neon flag. All of these efforts help build a long-term dataset about the survival and reproduction of these very long-lived plants. These plants face many challenges living in small prairie patches, but they are tough.
Below is a summary of the number of census records taken so far at nine sites
site rawSite demo.id
1 other 1
2 alf around landfill 11
3 cg common garden 23
4 eelr east elk lake road 19
5 lfe landfill east 118
6 lfw landfill west 99
7 lce loeffler corner east 78
8 lcw loeffler corner west 81
9 rrxx railroad crossing 36
Amy Waananen’s just had a paper published in New Phytologist. She reports how the difference in flowering time of a plant’s two parents influences the plant’s fitness. Many researchers have investigated how differences in the location of parents (close or far) influences progeny fitness. Few, if any, have investigated how differences in flowering time affects progeny fitness.
Differences in flowering time are not as straightforward as differences in location. In space, parents can be far or close and we use distance to measure it. To state the obvious, negative distances do not makes sense. In time, parents can be far (asynchronous) or near (synchronous). But maternal plants can be earlier or later than paternal plants. This aspect of distance in time is fundamentally different than distance in space. Amy used positive and negative values to indicate which parent flowered earlier. Remarkably, this perspective really mattered to the fitness of progeny. Wow!
Amy’s discovery is really cool, it’s a surprise, and it’s a useful contribution to basic science. Amy also suggested some non-intuitive management strategies that can help promote plant fitness and resilience of populations in the face of changing environments.
Here’s the citation:
Waananen, A., Ison, J.L., Wagenius, S. and Shaw, R.G. 2025. The fitness effects of outcrossing distance depend on parental flowering phenology in fragmented populations of a tallgrass prairie forb. New Phytologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.70240
Ian Roberts presented his thesis research “Impacts of Prescribed Fire and Land Use History on Ground Nesting Bees” at the Chicago Botanic Garden on April 30th. The presentation was well received by those attendees in the room and those who attended via zoom. After the public presentation, Ian successfully defend his Masters thesis for the program in Plant Biology and Conservation at NU. Congratulations, Ian!
Ian’s research advances our understanding of ground nesting bees, prescribed fires, and nesting habitat for bees in remnant and restored tallgrass prairie. Stay tuned for a publication and recommendations for land managers!
This is part of our project “How Do Prescribed Fires Affect Native Prairie Bees?”
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
Jared gave a presentation at the Chicago Plant Science Symposium on April 19th about our big prescribed fire experiment. He focused this talk on fire effects on plant reproduction & demography.
This is part of our project “How Do Prescribed Fires Affect Native Prairie Bees?”
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
Emma presented results of her honor’s project at the poster symposium on April 15th at the U of MN. Emma assessed concentrations of several types of sugar in nectar collected from tiny florets of Echinacea plants. We are learning how prescribed fire affects sugars in nectar because nectar is an important food for pollinators, like bees. Emma worked in the lab of Dr. Rahul Roi at St Catherine University and was advised by Dr. Ruth Shaw at University of Minnesota. We are so proud of Emma!
Emma presenting her poster with Rahul & Ruth.
This is part of our project “How Do Prescribed Fires Affect Native Prairie Bees?”
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
Wednesday evening (March 19) we gathered to share a meal & review many of our recent lab accomplishments. We made numerous advances in science, conservation, and education. This evening we focused on all the achenes we have been separating from heads & chaff, scanning, counting, randomizing, xraying, and classifying–all with the aim of estimating reproductive effort and success of Echinacea plants in our experimental plots and in select prairie remnants. Ian, Maddie, and Wyatt gave updates on projects they are working on.
Members of Team Echinacea went to the Stand Up For Science rally in downtown Chicago today. It was good to be in solidarity with folks who care about science, our country, and our future.
Here’s a photo of Maddie, Ian, Wyatt, and Fannie taken by Stuart. We saw Mike and Shannon at the rally. Did Team Echinacea rally in other cities?
Learn more about attacks on science and what you can do to help:
Team Echinacea includes many volunteers who help in the lab. Volunteers contribute to all steps in the ACE process to estimate reproductive effort and outcomes in Echinacea plants from experimental plots and observational studies. During 2024, our 16 volunteers devoted 2192.5 hours to the Echinacea Project! Here is a summary of hours.
initials
hours
aw2
886.0
cak
31.5
cs1
177.0
dstc
71.0
eem
7.0
jln
132.5
jrd
56.0
kja
121.5
ljb
55.0
lc2
47.0
ml
106.0
mnm
24.0
mh2
97.0
mdk
3.0
pp
98.0
scb
280.0
TOTAL
2192.5
We are very thankful for our incredible team of volunteers, the Echinacea Project would not be possible without their hard work and dedication!
Today we’re closing the lab for a two week break. Team Echinacea has had a fun and productive year. We worked really hard in the lab and it’s time to take a well-deserved vacation.
We made great strides in the lab this past year quantifying annual reproductive fitness of plants from many experiments, mostly Echinacea angustifolia–the narrow-leaved coneflower. We estimate fruit counts and seed counts in hundreds of heads we harvest each year using the ACE protocol: cleaning heads, rechecking heads, scanning fruits, counting fruits, taking random samples, x-raying samples of fruits, and classifying radiographs. We were way behind because the lab was closed during the pandemic. We are catching up. In the past two months we moved all heads harvested from one experiment in Sept 2024 all the way through counting all fruits of each head three times. We have a really great data set.
Thank you to the volunteers who contributed so much to our science and conservation endeavors. Thank you, everybody. Enjoy your vacation–you deserve it. I look forward to working with everyone in 2025!
Hailey hand pollinated flowers on six silver-leaf scurf pea plants (Pediomelum argophyllum). We are harvesting the plants as the pods ripen. Wyatt harvested two plants on 30 Aug, I harvested two today (9 Sept). Two remain–each is attached to a pin flag so it doesn’t tumble way. But don’t seem like that will happen soon.
Yesterday I squeezed every pod from the plant that Wyatt harvested S of 23518-L. They all felt the same (empty), including the treatment pods that have yellow & blue twist-ties. Many of the pods had fallen off the stem, but not the bagged one. This time I gently put the entire plant into a large paper grocery bag to keep the pods on the stems. I regret i didn’t take any photos of the plants.
Stay tuned to learn about effects of hand pollination on seed set in the silver leaf scurf pea!
