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Daily Update for July 7th: TOTAL DEMO

This morning most of the team met Jared! He gave us a really nice, knowledgeable, and interesting talk about TOTAL DEMO. We headed to tower to start our introduction to TOTAL DEMO, we as a whole found that it’s really easy (mostly because of the low number of flowers and the fact that it wasn’t 85 degrees) I think we all enjoyed not only learning more about TOTAL DEMO but also being able to do it!

After doing Tower we headed to East of Town Hall to keep doing TOTAL DEMO, and were met by Shawn Papon a worker for US fish and wildlife and he happily explained to us their efforts to restore prairie remnants and how he was so excited to finally meet someone in our team! Shawn said how he has heard of us but never had the opportunity of meeting any of us!

After East of Town Hall we headed back to Hjelm for lunch, and currently we all are working on independent projects while in the watch for a big storm or even hail. Not all of us are excited for hail (I am) Well that was the daily update, I hope you liked it and THERE ARE MORE TO COME SO KEEP READING!

I attached some interesting pictures!

Viola Pod Update | 2025-07-07

The Viola Pod experiment has been going well! Pods have been monitored consistently. The following is the data of their pod counts over the past couple weeks.

Viola ID (planted position)Pod Count June 24thPod Count June 25thPod Count June 27thPod Count June 30thPod Count July 2ndPod Count July 7th
2000000
3476632
4161616161114
5666649
6000021
7444435
81335528
10554320
11778568
12777854
13555856
14996634
15443345
16487845
18222243
19885525
20665626
21333162
22334222
23554204

Wyatt’s Minnesota Goodbye

After four years on Team Echinacea, today is my last official day with the project. As a write this from the Chicago Botanic Garden, it’s hard not to get all retrospective about it. I’ve been on the team for 1/6th of my life! But also, only for about 1/8th of the span of the Echinacea Project’s existence. Now that’s crazy. I feel so fortunate to have been with this project in so many capacities—first as a summer REU student, then a work study, a grad student, and lastly a lab manager/research assistant. My time here has profoundly shaped me as a scientist and person, and I will always be grateful.

My last weeks in the field in Minnesota were at the start of June, first with just Stuart, Maddie, Maddie, and Jared, and then joined by the rest of the summer 2025 team. We got a lot done, and had fun to boot!

During the first week, the Maddies, Jared, and I staked, flagged, and searched seed addition transects in the remnants. Many seedlings juveniles were found!

After the rest of the team arrived the following Monday, we did some onboarding activities, including a visit to Staffanson and Hegg Lake. Both these sites burned this spring! This, plus the fact that we burned p1 and p8, means that p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p7, p8, and p9 all burned this year. Gee whiz! A bountiful harvest lies ahead, I suspect.

The other big activity/accomplishment from this week (at least when I was there) was flagging p1. Usually, this is an endeavor that takes at least a couple days. However, with a brief head start and Ruth’s help, the team was able to flag the entire plot in one day! We benefitted from the fact that p1 burned in the spring because old pin flags, staples, and plants were easier to find. Huzzah!

After my last day in the field, Wednesday the 18th, the team gathered at Elk Lake for a potluck and swimming. Everyone brought delicious food, from fruit to beans to pasta salads to baked goods. Sooo satiated. After some diving shenanigans, the Maddies and I headed to the last stop on my Hoffman bucket list: Bullfrogs. Bullfrogs was not hoppin’, but we still got in a couple rounds of Maddie Sadler trouncing us at pool. The next day, my dad picked me up to fish for smallmouth bass (classic) east of Sauk Centre before we headed back to the cities.

Side note – I recently acquired a bare-bones digital point-and-shoot camera and have been enjoying clicking it at people. Below are two unique reactions to realizing your photo is being taken.

Now that the recent field pics are posted, I want to leave off with some of my fav pictures/moments/memories from the last few years that may or may not have made it on the flog before.

Burning:

Flora and Fauna:

Minnesota skies:

Shenanigans:

Thank you to everyone who’s made the last few years on the team such a treat. I’ll miss the prairie immensely during my upcoming stint in California, but there’s something to be said for new adventures, too. I’ll see you around!

– Wyatt

Day in the Life – July 2, 2025

New members of team Echinacea!
This week, we moved in our newest members—goats. The goats assist in weed removal. These animals are particularly good at removing the persistent and invasive buckthorn from patches around Hjelm. They’re also great for team morale. We have also had some time with Gretel and Stuart’s dog (Blue) and cat (Teenie).

Demography and surveying
Echinacea angustifolia is a long-lived perennial, but we are unsure how long they actually live. To track individual plant lifespans, we “demo” every season. This marks the 30th year of demography data for the Echinacea Project!
This week, we have made good headway demo-ing and surveying the remnant prairie field sites. As a team, we have taken demography on over 300 plants in the past two days. Our high school and REU students practiced their echinacea spotting, visor usage, and GPS skills.

Pollinator projects
REU interns Grace and Kyra have solidified their experimental design on their pollinator mark and recapture project. We used nets and vials to capture local honey bees as practice before we move on to bee populations in the remnants. To mark them, we placed the bees in our constructed “bee plungers”, easing them to the top of a mesh-covered tube, where we could them use paint marks to place tiny dots on their abdomens. The order and color of these dots will allow Grace and Kyra to keep track of each individual bee that they capture throughout the project.

transplant Comandra

Project Comandra umbellata: Pair Plugs

The project I will be working on this summer is transplanting and growing Comandra umbellata with either its field host or with a Galium boreale plug. Today, I prepared the growing container for the plants. We leveled off the ground, drilled holes in the container, cut and placed the drainage tile, and purchased river rock, black dirt, and beach sand, which we used to fill the container. See pictures below.

The next step is to decide which sites and which plants we are going to collect. Finally, we will plant the plants in the growing container and record observations about their growth.

Transplanting in P8

Yesterday Team Echinacea took the afternoon to do some transplanting in P8. We planted 4 different species: Dichanthelium leibergii, Solidago missouriensis, Bromus kalmii, and Carex bicknellii. All of these species we want to establish in P8 because seed collection is very difficult and by starting plants from plugs we hope to establish enough plants to be able to successfully collect seeds to distribute in other areas of the experimental plot. These species are of interest to prairie restorationist and could serve a basis for future projects by members of the Echinacea Project. Solidago missouriensis are a colonel species but flower infrequently making them hard to collect seed from. In the past we have had another member of team Echinacea research Dichanthelium leibergii and could be used as a great focal species to conduct a future study on pollination biology.

The transplanting yesterday also served as good experience for folks to come together and design a plot together, get experience flagging out a new plot, as well as give them good experience with planting different types of plugs in different settings. Everyone did a great job in working together and delegating tasks and got 120 plants planted in only ~90 minutes!

Planting List:

Species# of plugs planted
Dichanthelium leibergii40
Solidago missouriensis20
Bromus kalmii30
Carex bicknellii30

Bonus Update: The robin babies are growing up and getting big enough to watch while at lunch. Soon enough they’ll be off on their own!

Weedies are meanies :( (Getting rid of invasive plants 06/23/2025)

Today we went to the surrounding areas of P1 and P8 —Experimental Plot number 1 and Experimental Plot number 8 respectively— to take care of the weeds found in those places (birdsfoot trefoil aka Lotus corniculatus, and sweet clover aka Melilotus officinalis).

We know that invasive plants have been expanding around the remnants of prairie and that these invasive plants represent a risk for native prairie plants (Echinacea angustifolia, porcupine grass, little bluestem, big bluestem) as they compete for the remaining space and resources, but after trying for some time we have not found a herbicide that eliminates those weeds without damaging native prairie plants, therefore we choose to manually get rid of these weeds. We spent the whole morning getting rid of the invasive plants and we did enjoy it and it made us very happy to make plants happy. 🙂

The Search for Stipa in P1 (2025-06-20)

This week the team went out to experimental plot one with one clear goal, locate Hesperostipa Spartea, commonly referred to as Porcupine Grass. The team divided the plots and went off and searched–rows 42-49 were excluded from data collection. With an average time of 13 minutes per row and an extraordinary performance by Gael being the team member with the most data gathered with 17 rows. While the plants were not dry enough for seed collection, they were marked for a quick trip back to gather seeds.

RowsInitialsDateStartFinishTime Spent
26MD | KNS06/18/2511:0911:340:25
27MD | KNS06/18/2511:3911:560:17
21CLM | GGL06/18/2511:1911:430:24
20CLM | GGL06/18/2511:0111:180:17
24AJB | GAK06/18/2511:0211:330:31
25AJB | GAK06/18/2511:3411:550:21
22AJB | GAK06/18/2513:5814:210:23
23AJB | GAK06/18/2514:2114:340:13
14MRS | KNS06/18/2513:5814:090:11
15MRS | KNS06/18/2514:0914:230:14
10CLM | GGL06/18/2514:0014:060:06
11CLM | GGL06/18/2514:0714:170:10
16CLM | GGL06/18/2514:1814:300:12
17CLM | GGL06/18/2514:3014:440:14
13MRS | KNS06/18/2514:2514:340:09
12MRS | KNS06/18/2514:3514:430:08
34AJB | GAK06/18/2514:3714:540:17
35AJB | GAK06/18/2514:5315:080:15
37CLM | GGL06/18/2515:0415:160:12
36CLM | GGL06/18/2514:4615:040:18
19MRS | KNS06/18/2514:5715:050:08
18MRS | KNS06/18/2514:4714:570:10
28AJB | GAK06/18/2515:1715:320:15
29AJB | GAK06/18/2515:3215:470:15
31MRS | KNS06/18/2515:2915:390:10
30MRS | KNS06/18/2515:1215:290:17
41CLM | GGL06/18/2515:2915:440:15
40CLM | GGL06/18/2515:1815:290:11
33MRS | KNS06/18/2516:0316:190:16
32MRS | KNS06/18/2515:4316:010:18
52AJB | GAK06/18/2516:1516:300:15
53MRS | KNS06/18/2516:2816:300:02
54AJB | GGL06/20/2511:0011:060:06
55AJB | GGL06/20/2511:0611:130:07
39CLM | GGL06/18/2516:0316:150:12
38CLM | GGL06/18/2515:5416:030:09
50AJB | GGL06/20/2510:4810:530:05
51AJB | GGL06/20/2510:5310:590:06
56CLM | GGL06/18/2516:1716:300:13

Viola Status Update (Friday, June 20th)

This is an update of the Viola propagation tub and the state of the plants.

This image shows the plants that are dead.

All remaining plants have pods. The table shows the information of each remaining plant, including tag, position and pod count.

TagPlanted PositionPod Count
2036
441414
1957
44261
1277
4811
443104
6115
9126
14135
111411
16156
3167
445182
7196
18204
15212
17224
13237
Picture of the Viola tub taken by Aaron.

2025 Directed Observations

Maddie and Kyra went to two remnant sites in Aanenson and West Aanenson to observe individual characteristics and compare the differences between the two sites and transects within. The transects at both sites were located on a natural hill, however the transects at West Aanenson were closer in proximity to a roadcut. Among both sites, it did not look like there were any recent burns. We observed more echinacea plants among transects in Aanenson in comparison to the transects in West Aanenson. Both sites seemed to have no history of agricultural use, though there were active corn crops across the road. We observed a larger diversity of plants at the Aanenson site, and we hypothesize that this is due to a difference in land management techniques as sites are owned by different agencies, though overall there are more similarities than differences between the two sites.

We saw many different plants at the different sites including: 

  • Narrow-leaf purple coneflower (Echinacea Angustifolia) – native non-leguminous forb
  • Prairie rose (Rosa arkansan) – native non -leguminous forb
  • Ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) – non-native non-leguminous forb
  • Silverleaf scurf pea (Pediomelum argophyllum) – native legume
  • Lead plant (Amorpha canescens) – native legume
  • Porcupine grass (Hesperostipa spartea) – native C3 grass
  • Brome grass (Galium spp.) – non-native c3 grass 
  • Big blue stem (Andropogon gerardii) – native c4 grass

Just to name a few….

Ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) – non-native non-leguminous forb