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Friday morning started out with a quick round of phenology in the common garden. Split between four or five of us it only took about 20 minutes each and it seems like flowering is just about done! From what every one who has been here in previous years, this year appears to be earlier than usual.
After phenology we all had a few hours to work on our individual projects. Although a few people are still doing fieldwork, most of us are done or beginning to wrap up, and moving on to data analysis. I transferred my first data set to R and started attempting to figure out how to organize it with some help from Stuart.
We had an early lunch to allow for a longer stretch of work in the afternoon and managed to finish measuring at Jennifer’s plot at Hegg Lake a few minutes after 5pm. We took a short and very welcome break halfway through for watermelon that Jennifer brought. And managed not to loose any surveying pins, despite me forgetting to pick up the pile I made and Maria’s attempts to hide one in her flag bag.
Hi guys,
Saturday morning i woke up at 6am (body clock working on weekday schedule) and couldn’t go back to sleep, so i decided to watch the approaching storm, from the safety of the front door of the town hall. Saw some really interesting things that will sound like they were right from a children’s book but it was all true.
The sky was a strange yellow glow. i’m guessing it’s because of the sunrise before a storm. In the north and northwest direction, there were dark clouds and low rumbling thunder in the background. But in the opposite direction, birds were chirping incessantly. The sun was literally gleaming above the dilapidated barn house. I saw a rabbit prancing across the neighbor’s front yard. I watched as storm clouds in the west covered and uncovered a double rainbow. Gradually the storm clouds moved from north to south. Some pattering of rain, and cool lightning chases in the north/northwest, accompanied by louder thunder.
Around 6.50 i went back to bed. Jennifer was already up – she was going to meet Stuart at the Hjelm House at 8, and then go to Caribou Coffee in Alexandria to work on her manuscript for the whole day.
Later in the morning, Katherine went to the common garden to do her aphids experiment, which took all day.
Taking advantage of the cool temperature (high 70s with 10mph wind), Jill went out for a run at 10 and I went out for a slow jog at 11. Lydia, Andrew and Kelsey (Andrew’s special friend) went to Alexandria around noon – Andrew was showing Kelsey around. Kelly, Shona, and Jill went to the Starbuck beach in the afternoon and had lots of fun. Apparently there was lake itch at the first beach they went to but they found another beach on the same lake that didn’t have the itch.
In the evening, Kelly and Shona went out for a run before going to Alexandria to watch The Dark Knight Rises. Andrew and Kelsey joined them at the movies.
Oh, and the obligatory picture. My camera got really wet in the rain (i foolishly put it in my raincoat pocket), so it’s retired from service for now. But I still have tons of good pictures from this summer and the last, so no worries.
This was from the day of the storm. The yellow glow I was talking about. That’s my bike parked outside my field site at Hegg Lake.
And this is a really cool bug I found on Dichanthelium. It can climb vertically and upside down very well, and it seems to have suction pads on its feet. Photo courtesy of Lydia.
Maria
Here is a link to a csv of my data sheet!
angustifoliacrossdata_2012_all_locations.csv
And also, here’s the script that I used in R.
Compatibility script.r.txt
RAIN!!! After weeks of very little in the way of precipitation, Team Echinacea was rained out on Wednesday morning. Instead of the usual field work and phenology, we worked on data entry and other analyses for our individual projects. Fortunately, it stopped raining around 10 AM and I was able to head out to Staffanson Prairie Preserve to collect data for my phenology project. West Staffanson was burned this past spring and a lot of the plants are flowering later than usual. This rain seemed to have jump started flowering and it seemed like all of West Staffanson went from young, green sprouts to beautiful flowering plants over night. Walking into West Staffanson, I felt like Dorothy entering the land of Oz! Below I’ve attached a few pictures of the flowering plants and pollinators that I saw. Because West Staffanson was burned pretty late in the spring, many of the flowers that have already finished blooming in other remnants were in their prime on Wednesday. In the afternoon, we started working on phenology in Jennifer’s Plot at Hegg Lake.
Allium
An Echinacea on its first day of flowering.
Flowering Amorpha canescens with a pollinator!
Imagine walking into a foggy wonderland where all you can hear is the sound of birds, frogs, and the occasional drip of water. Well, you should be jealous because that’s where we spent our morning: Hegg Lake!
We spent the entire morning measuring Jennifer’s plot, and we are nearly halfway done (I think). Take that, echinacea!
This afternoon after lunch, Jennifer gave us her presentation on her work with assortative mating based on phenology. Stuart then briefed us on doing demography in the remnants, where we find all of this year’s flowering plants and record data on them and then GPS their coordinates.
And now most of us are sitting around as we eagerly await an all-Amerrrrrican dinner of mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, veggies, and apple crisp lovingly prepared by Kelly and Andrew! Nom nom nom….
Tuesday’s weather compared to Monday was “not as bad” to speak Minnesotan. While individual projects were tackled and we measured in the afternoon, it still isn’t done. The glimmer of hope is that one good day of measurement will finish the task for the year.
In more MN terms, the storm Wed morning was also not so bad as the late July storm last year that uprooted trees and took out power. The picture is from the Runestone Park devastation that Maria and I witnessed last year.
Pardon the belated appearance of my proposal on the flog, but here it is!
Proposal draft 2.pdf
This past weekend a group of us went over to Glacial Lakes State Park for some hiking and a change of scenery (i.e. trees). During our hike we passed a few sections of remnant prairie, evident by the presence of lead plant (Amorpha canescens). One of these had what appeared to be a flowering Echinacea angustifolia. Due to a combination of curiosity and habit, I walked over to check the plant for aphids. Sure enough, there they were:
They looked like Aphis echinaceae, though they were slightly bigger than the aphids I’ve seen around here. The reason I mention this is that the specimens for Aphis echinaceae were collected in our field sites throughout Douglas County. Glacial Lakes State Park is a little under 30 miles away. I didn’t collect any aphids, but I thought it was an observation worth sharing.
Monday was quite sultry, if I remember correctly. In the morning we divided forces to look at flowering phenology in C1 and to finish measuring the plants in Amy Dykstra’s experiment at Hegg Lake. She has two experimental plots there: one containing the offspring of inter-remnant crosses and the other containing seeds collected from source populations between Minnesota and South Dakota. She sowed seeds in 2008 and has been tracking their progress every year since. Once we finished finding and measuring plants, Stuart took GPS points for each experimental plot:
While he was doing that, Shona trekked off into the prairie to check on the plants in her hybridization experiment.
Meanwhile, Lydia and I waited by the truck and took advantage of the opportunity for an epic pose. I’d say it was successfully epic.
With the goal to be done with work by noon, I biked up to the Hjelm house at 6:30 this morning to survey flowering plants in the common garden, and by 7:30 was hunkered down in the Hjelm house basement with the dissecting scope and an army of ants. Since Thursday, I’ve been identifying the ants I collected from Echinacea plants. Ant ID can be incredibly frustrating, given their small size and minute characteristics. For instance, one of the major differences between genera is the number of teeth on the mandibles! Exasperated after two hours of looking through the scope, I decided to pin my ants and return to ID-ing on Monday.
Later this coming week, I’ll also attack the ants I collected from my pitfall traps, some of which have over 100 specimens! I also need to decide how many weeks I’m going to collect from my traps, and how much of the data I can realistically get through before the two poster sessions in August.
Other than my ant party, here’s what else was going on today:
–Kelly flew Felix, our adopted kitten, to his new family this morning!
–Shona, Lydia, Maria, and Andrew surveyed flowering plants in the common garden and then headed to Kelly’s remnants to work on her phenology while she’s out of town
–Katherine worked on her aphid experiment in the common garden
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