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More defending your thesis

I defended my thesis on May 16th, presenting the results of my research on the hygroscopic motion of big bluestem and indian grass. I’ve attached the presentation to this post, though the presentation is a bit light on text. I’m putting together a section on my website with more text, which I’ll link when it’s ready.

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MEEC poster, awn edition

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Click to embiggen the poster. This isn’t the full poster, but I’m not uploading a 30MB PDF. The videos can be read with a smartphone and a QR reader, or flip through my posts, as all the videos are on the flog somewhere.

Hesperostipa spartea search protocol

Attached is the “weather-tested” search protocol. While my partner found more than a dozen out of 75 or so, I found two out of 100. Maybe I am not the right person to write a protocol about finding these plants.?!

It is very neat to think about these things being seedlings a year or two ago and now they are 20+ cm tall? plants that will produce seed…….sometime.
Hesperostipa spartea Search Protocol.docx

This is the 3rd summer in a row that I have taken part of the Echinacea project! I teach 9-12 sciences (10th grade Biology)at Great Plains Lutheran High in Watertown, SD. Conducting summer research is the best way to incorporate real science into my classroom! While I was a pollen collector and image maker the first summer and a pollen crosser last summer; this summer I am going to collect insects that may or may not be moving pollen. Following the floral neighborhood study of 2009, I will collect and categorize insects from different sites to make an inventory of insect life. I hope it will shed some light on exactly which insects can be found and relate it to the diversity of the plants at sites. It will also be a useful collection for my students in the future.

Stipa and the common garden

I’ve been working with the Stipa germination data we collected from the common garden over the summer for Stuart’s R class and, among other things, have come up with a little plot of the common garden. Filled-in blue circles are where we found Stipa alive, empty circles had no seedlings. A neat thing would be some kind of heat map for longest leaf or number of leaves, but I’ll try that later.

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Stipa tag found

Tag #1028 was just found in the ground near the SW corner of Hjelm house porch.

Draft 2010 Stipa protocols

2010 Stipa Draft Protocol.pdf. The Google Docs wasn’t really working out… Comment with your thoughts and changes.

Stipa sticking spree!

Having stickered and scanned all of the collected Stipa seed (great job Ian, Hillary, and Lauren!) we’ve gone through and stuck them all into their foamy rows. 1700ish seeds later, we’re ready to plant out in the common garden! Here’s a few pictures:

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The awns! They move!

Check it out on youtube. It’s even available in full HD!

I’m actually just linking this because this blog isn’t wide enough to fit the whole movie.

Time-lapse time

So I think I have my basic setup for the time-lapse photography for checking out those stipa awns. Using one of Greg’s aquariums, a camera, tripod, computer and such. I’ll be able to change the humidity soon enough and really start the experiment.

Some of the stipa, just as a test
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And here’s my setup. Off to the left of the aquarium is the 500W halogen light. The seeds and black felt are inside the aquarium. In front of that is the camera with a blind on the front to help knock down some glare from the front glass. Attached is the computer, which is what I’m using to control the time-lapse.
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ArcGIS: conquered!

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So these are the Stipa that have been collected so far. I’ve labeled a couple of the places on the map.

I was having trouble projecting the data exported from GPS Pathfinder Office (trimble) and noticed that no coordinate system was defined (same issue with the DOQ maps Stuart gave me; the GeoTIFFs didn’t have a spatial definition). The GPS data should be North American 1983 in the Geographic Coordinate System folder (right click on the data in ArcCatalog, hit the XY Coordinate System tab and hit the Select button). The DOQ maps ought to be using the NAD_1983_UTM_Zone_15N from the Projected Coordinate System folder. Dumping all of these files into ArcMap (and a little fiddling) gave me this nice map.

Next plan of attack is to make it work in GPS Pathfinder Office, as it’s much less complicated than ArcGIS.