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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.
We are very thankful for our incredible team of volunteers, the Echinacea Project would not be possible without their hard work and dedication!  We’re interested in investigating what resources are available to Echinacea visitors and learning more about the pollen and nectar Echinacea produces. We hope to learn if the nutritional resources available differ before and after burns. In 2022, Britney House developed methods for collecting nectar from Echinacea using microcapillary tubes. Read more about her methods here. During the summer of 2024, the team collected pollen and nectar samples from Echinacea angustifolia at 12 sites in and around Solem Township, MN. We searched for and shot the ~10 plants (or, if few were available, as many as we could find) at each site that were closest to a random point. We then bagged up to five of the heads with pollinator exclusion bags for those 10 plants. Throughout the duration of their flowering, we collected pollen from all bagged plants and nectar from five of them per site. We removed bags from pollen/nectar plants and backup plants when they were done flowering, and we collected until a a limit was set of a cumulative 10mm of nectar from each plant. This year we also collected immature florets from each bagged head at the start of sampling. Following some experimentation, we conducted nectar collection only in the afternoons, while pollen collection could be done any time of day. In total, we collected vials of pollen, nectar, and vials containing immature florets from 60 plants. Pollen and nectar tubes were given to Rahul Roy at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, who will be doing pollen and nectar analysis. Tubes containing immature florets were sent with Grace Hirzel at North Dakota State University in Fargo, ND for pollen grain count and size analysis. Data entry for collection datasheets is ongoing. Pollen data entry is started and nectar data is a little over half done with the help of Emma Reineke. Emma will also be using part of this dataset for her senior thesis project at the University of Minnesota. Scans can be found at: Dropbox/teamEchinacea2024/z.pollenNectarDataEntry/scans.
Echinacea pallida is a species of Echinacea that is not native to Minnesota. It was mistakenly introduced to our study area during a restoration of Hegg Lake WMA around 2006 (Stuart’s recollection). This is concerning, because we don’t know how a similar species may impact or local Echinacea angustifolia! Will they hybridize? Could pallida outcompete angustifolia? Ever since pallida have started springing up, Team Echinacea has visited the pallida restoration, taken flowering phenology, and collected demography on the non-native plant. We have decapitated all flowering E. pallida each year to avoid cross-pollination with the local Echinacea angustifolia. Each year, we record the number of heads on each plant and the number of rosettes, collect precise GPS points for each individual, and cut off all the heads before they produce fruits. Echinacea pallida flowering:This year, we cut E. pallida heads on June 26th. Overall, we found and shot 172 flowering E. pallida plants with 512 normal heads in total, averaging 2.98 heads per plant, though the max was 20 on a single plant! These non-native plants were hearty with an average rosette count of 7.20 rosettes and an astounding individual with a maximum of 88 rosettes. We did not take phenology data on E. pallida this year. 
You can find more information about E. pallida flowering phenology and previous flog posts on the background page for the experiment. exPt06:Experimental plot 6 was the first E. angustifolia x E. pallida hybrid plot planted by Team Echinacea. A total of 66 Echinacea hybrids were originally planted. All individuals have E. angustifolia dams and E. pallida sires. In 2024, we visited 23 positions, 4 of which were can’t find year 3 in 2023 and didn’t get their final double check. We found living plants at all positions but those four (so, 19)! Last year, for the first time, 3 plants flowered in this plot. This year, no plants flowered.
You can find more information about experimental plot 6 and previous flog posts about it on the background page for the experiment. exPt07:Experimental plot 7 is the second E. pallida x E. angustifolia plot. It contains conspecific crosses of each species as well as reciprocal hybrids, totaling 294 pdeigreed individuals. We took phenology records between July 10th and July 18th. There were 42 flowering plants this year; from these we harvested 87 heads. Heads in this plot were covered by pollinator exclusion bags during the growing season to prevent cross-pollination with nearby Echinacea populations. 
You can find more information about experimental plot 7 and previous flog posts about it on the background page for the experiment. exPt09:There were originally 745 seedlings planted in exPt09. Experimental plot 9 is a hybrid plot, but, unlike the other two hybrid plots, we do not have a perfect pedigree of the plants. That is because the E. angustifolia and E. pallida maternal plants used to generate seedlings for exPt09 were open-pollinated. At this point, some but not all plants in this plot were tested for paternity, revealing that there are some hybrids. This year, we took phenology records between July 9th and July 18th. During measuring, we searched at 292 positions and found evidence of 234 living plants in 2024. Of these individuals, 70 were flowering. We harvested 110 heads from this plot! Heads in this plot were covered by pollinator exclusion bags during the growing season to prevent cross-pollination with nearby Echinacea populations. 
You can find out more information about experimental plot 9 and flog posts mentioning the experiment on the background page for the experiment. During the summer of 2024, Team Echinacea completed the second year of its ENRTF funded project to better understand how prescribed fire influences ground nesting bee habitat, food resources, and diversity. Understanding the associations between land management methods and ground nesting bees is essential for providing reccomendations to policymakers and practitioners interested in native bee conservation. We surveyed solitary bee diversity and nesting habitat before and after prescribed fires in a subset of 30 prairie remnants and 15 prairie restorations to determine how prescribed fire affects solitary bee nesting habitat and abundance. We used emergence traps to sample the community of solitary ground nesting bees. This was complemented by detailed measures of soil and litter to characterize how prescribed burning influences the nesting habitat (read more here).  We deployed emergence traps at our random “burn and bee points”(BBPTs) in prairie remnants and restorations from early June to mid September. Our deployments spanned three rotations (4-6) of BBPTs and we put out a total of ~1,159 emergence traps. On reccomendation from Dr. Alex Harmon-Threatt, we also performed 10 minute “pollard walks” on deployment to estimate the number of foraging bees at each site. These foraging numbers will be compared to nesting incidence as part of Ian Roberts’ thesis project. As of December 21st, specimens caught in this year’s deployments have been pinned, labeled, and transported from Chicago Botanic Garden to the University of Minnesota, where Zach Portman, a bee taxonomist, will identify them. Team Echinacea also collected lots of non-bee bycatch while processing specimens collected in the traps: including millipedes, flies, and even a prairie skink! To avoid wasting these specimens, we plan to categorize this bycatch into broad taxonomic groups (like Dipterans, Orthopterans, etc) and examine potential associations between our experimental treatments and general arthropod diversity across our study sites.  While working on pinning and processing specimens, Ian Roberts produced a poster containing analyses from the 2023 emergence trapping data to present at Entomology 2024. The poster can be viewed here. Future data analyses will feature data from both sampling years, as well as microhabitat measurments and and diversity indices.
During summer 2024, Team Echinacea continued to collect data on local environmental conditions in order to understand which environmental factors are associated with good habitat for ground-nesting bees. These data complement emergence trapping for our ENRTF funded research on fire’s influence on ground nesting bees habitats. We sampled local environmental conditions near randomly placed “burn and bee points” (BBPTs) in prairie remnants and restorations.  Unlike the 2023 season, we did not collect data on light levels at BBPTs this year. Instead, we measured soil temperature just under the surface using a digital thermometer, along with soil compaction via a penetrometer and litter depth via a meter stick. Team Echinacea conducted microhabitat assessments for remnant prairies at rotation 4 BBPTs. Over the summer, we took microhabitat assessment measurements at a total of 241 measurments.
Vacating the lab 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! The Viola propagation tub Team Echinacea installed this past summer was designed with a few goals in mind. First of all, we wanted the tub to produce Viola pedatifida seed that could be used to help seed this important spring native throughout our remnants and experimental plots. We have already seen a pretty good return on our investment from the seed production end, just this fall 10 ripe pods have been harvested each containing between 20 and 30 seeds so this season around 250 seeds have been collected. Additionally, 9 Immature pods were collected before winterizing the plot, so hopefully, some good seeds will come from those as well. The second big goal we wanted to explore with this setup is learning more about small-scale production plots. Several other species have been known to grow well in beds like violets and hopefully, through managing this violet plot, we can learn more about what to expect. Other notable species that may go into future production plots are Ranunculus rhomboideus, Fragaria virginiana, Geum triflorum, and many others. Other good data to collect may come from the survivability of plants directly transferred from remnants and data on germination and survivability of seedlings. Plot Layout and Plant DataThe plot is laid out below with the corresponding position numbers. The left spreadsheet lays out the ID and source for each plant, and the right contains data on pods collected so far.    Collecting PodsThroughout the fall, 2 pods were followed from flowering to splitting of the pod. Pictures were taken each day along the entire course each morning before lunch. each pod took 17 days from flower to splitting open. Photos here will be arranged in inverse chronological order starting with pod splitting and then counting backwards. Moving forward we would like to learn what the exact features are of a pod that is ready to harvest. So far these photos have shown 2 likely indicators. 1) the pod starts very green and small and slowly turns a pale cream color and fills out as it matures. 2) The pod stem transitions from a bent gooseneck shape into a more upright position while lightening in color. When a pod is ready the stem tends to be fairly straight or has a soft curvature. Violet 8               Violet 11                 Tucking in for WinterOct 24 2024 the violets seed production was slowing down and with winter weather on its way it was decided that we should tuck the violets in and cover them. Firstly litter and any seeds visible on the surface of the tub. Next, a 4-inch mulch of Straw cut from P1 was applied across the entire surface of the tub, being sure to cover all green stems from the violas. Lastly, a Sheet of hardware cloth was cut to the length of the tub to prevent the intrusion of digging animals. This sheet was bent around the edges of the tub and then weighed down by several stones. Afterwards, the violas should be safe until next summer.    Spring 2025A few things will definitely be on the docket for next spring. First off after the snow recedes the wire and mulch should be removed as soon as possible to ensure the soil warms and the volets get enough sunlight. As soon as the soil is removed an inch or so of compost should be applied across the entire bed. Once the violets emerge then the mulch can be reapplied to prevent weed development. Flowers should develop quickly and the job of picking ripe pods will almost certainly last all summer. Another batch we’re prioritizing in the lab is the pollinator observation (or polOb) experiment. The goal of this experiment is to learn more about the effects of fire on native bees and their behaviors. We spent time this summer observing Echinacea at 10 paired sites, half of which burned before the 2024 growing season. We then harvested heads from our observation plots for processing in the lab. Because we’re specifically interested in learning about pollination, heads in this group will be streamlined all the way through to the classifying steps to learn about seed set, and we are less concerned about counting. Here’s our progress so far:  NOTE: 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). We have a few experiments that we’re prioritizing here in the lab. We want to get the heads in these experiments through our ACE process as quickly as possible! One of these experiments is known by many names: q1, qGen, qGen1, big batch, etc. The experiment in question was planted in experimental plot 1 in 2003 and was designed to investigate the heritability of fitness using a quantitative genetics approach. We’re looking to redo the analysis we have on this experiment with several new years of data, including 2024! This year, very few plants in exPt01 flowered, so all experiments in that plot were lumped into one for ACE processing. I booted up Alex’s ACE progress visualization machine to see what our progress on this batch looks like so far! We only need to get this batch through counting, so we can skip the randomizing/xray/classifying steps.  |
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