Hi all,
Since this is my first flog entry of the season at quick intro for our new readers. My name is Jennifer and I am a Ph.D. graduate student at University of Illinois-Chicago in an integrated program called LEAP (landscapes ecological and anthropogenic processes) . I just finished up my third year and have been part of the Echinacea project for longer than I often like to admit. If you are an avid flog reader you may remember be from such classic 2007 entries like “Fishing in Minnesota�? and “Microsatellites in Echinacea…they do exist.�? Today I am going to discussing my plot at Hegg Lake. In the summer 2005 we followed the DAILY flowering phenology of the 224 flowering plants in the main Common Garden. We took the seeds from the flowering heads and germinated and planted around 4,000 (3,942 to be exact) and planted them in the spring of 2006 at a new common garden site at on DNR owned land near Hegg Lake (about 7.5 miles from the main Common Garden site). Hegg Lake is a beautiful site and it is, fortunately, on top of a small plateau so there is nearly always a breeze and the mosquitoes stay away.
Measuring at Hegg Lake 2008
We have just finished measuring and rechecking Hegg and I have final survival and growth info for this year. Unfortunately the last winter was really rough on my poor little plants and death was much higher than I would have liked. This also meant measuring and rechecking Hegg took a long time this year. Next year I must come up with a better method for measuring and rechecking. My current plan is to buy 50 meter tapes and measure along the 50 meter tape…I think this will dramatically reduce the time. Below is info for the last three years of survival and growth data. The first number the the year, then the average number of leaves, then the average height of tallest leaf (cm) and finally percent survival (cumulative).
2006- 2.13- 6.36- 94%
2007- 2.14- 13.24- 85%
2008- 2.07- 13.61- 76%
As you can see my plants barely grew (and that is only the ones that survived) and the average number of leaves actually went down. More disappointing is the survival which took at hit with the really long cold winter. That is it for Hegg this year…glad it is done…hopefully next year, with a site burn, my plants will grow more and death won’t be as bad.
This animated GIF file is a map of all plants that flowered in the CG on each day from July 5 to July 15th. Each dot represents a plants that’s flowering on the day (see upper right corner).
Click on the thumbnail to see a full-sized image.
This legend shows plants with 3, 1, and 2 heads flowering (left to right).
We had a busy day today. Reinforcements arrived to help on all of our projects. Ruth Shaw (U of MN) helped with phenology, bee tracking, PX caging, collecting pollen and crossing. Elliott Graham (Madison, WI) helped with bee tracking and PX caging. Jack Kiefer (Wadsworth, IL) is leading the plumbing initiatives and made progress on several fronts including connecting the main water line to the Hjelm house!
Great forward progress on a sultry day. Well, in late afternoon it was still with air temp of 85 degrees F and a dewpoint of 57 degrees F.
Less than 10% of the heads that we think will flower this season had started flowering as of Sunday. Flowering is so late this year! We’ll walk through the Garden systematically tomorrow (Tuesday) to see what’s new. It’s possible one head (49.33 946.33 grn) will be done flowering tomorrow.
There’s always something new and exciting going on when Team Echinacea is in full swing. After we all pitch in to assess flowering phenology tomorrow, Amy will work on her large-scale crossing experiment that requires erecting pollinator exclusion cages, collecting pollen & hand crossing. The fun doesn’t end there. We are tiling and plumbing the Hjelm House, photographing floral development on Echinacea heads, measuring plants at the Hegg Lake CG and the main CG, taking ladder-high aerial photography of flowering plants in the prairie remnants, and chasing bee pollinators in the CG. And that’s just tomorrow!
These bees thought it would add some excitement to their lives if they hired Team Echinacea to stand around them watch their… relations. Naive as they were, they didn’t realize that there was a camera in the crowd and the photos would inevitably be leaked to the Internet. This is sure to cause a scandal among the insects of the common garden when they read of it in the tabloids tomorrow.
Hi folks! Here’s the protocol for measuring plants in the common garden this year. The protocol hasn’t changed much from last year, but the description has improved; the protocol is now a html file and there are many nice images from 2007. Thanks to Jameson and Gretel for taking the photos. And thanks to the wonders of digital photography, Pendragon forms, the UMN library’s blog, and contributors to this flog. Wahoo! Let the counting of leaves, ants, and aphids begin!
Hey everybody, I pleasantly stumbled upon this blog today and i’m glad to see this year’s Team Echinacea is up and running. Everything is looking good. The Flog is definitely proving to be a useful, as well as fun and interesting tool. I was a member of Team Echinacea last year as well as the Bee Team.
I recently got the chance to watch an experienced beekeeper mark a queen honey bee. The process was very quick and easy and I think could be tailored to use in the field in MN. There is a special container used for capturing and marking. A marking pen with special bee marking paint is used. There is no cooling involved. I’m going to try to find a website that explains this. The marking paint used by beekeepers is designed to last for the lifetime of the bees. Here is a video from youtube that demonstrates the marking of a queen bee.
I think that you guys should invest in some marking pens and look into getting other beekeeping equipment, at least just to see what is out there. Last year we didn’t really look into that stuff so we were just kind of reinventing the wheel.
-Jameson
I’m working on improving our seedling search protocol, using perhaps photography, a physical grid, or some combination of things. Here’s a couple photos I took to test out a locating device: toothpick plus coffee stirrer plus thumbtack. The first photo is in easier short foliage conditions and has two red markers and a blue marker somewhere in the 1m diameter circle marked by the meter sticks. The second photo is in more difficult high foliage and has two red, a blue, and a white. All are visible in both pictures, but perhaps not immediately apparent. Happy hunting!
This is a picture of one of the plants at the landfill where Lecia and I are collecting plants. We didn’t collect this one (which I think is Delphinium carolinianum subsp. virescens (Nuttall) R. E. Brooks) because there were only three plants. Luckily Christine was with us to take some really good photos.
So far we have 53 collections from landfill, and there is still more out there that isn’t flowering/fruiting yet. I think that’s a fair number of specimens considering we haven’t spent much time there. The hardest part is waiting for our collections to dry out in the press so that we can identify them.
This legend shows plants with 3, 1, and 2 heads flowering (left to right).
