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Today was a successful day for Team Echinacea! This morning Stuart, Gretel, Maureen and I FINISHED RECRUITMENT!!! Check out the twitter feed for some awesome pictures of that. Also, we were able to flag flowering plants at 5 sites this morning! In the afternoon, I finally got to flag flowering plants at the sites I will be working on for my project, with the help of Elizabeth and Will! Check out this cool picture of some heads I flagged at East Elk Lake Road (and note the beautiful White Spruce plantation in the background)!!!
Team Echinacea has been hard at work in the field the last couple of weeks! But behind the scenes, we have also been working hard on designing our research projects for the summer. I am interested in looking at the asynchronous patterns of flowering phenology in E. angustifolia, and would also like to describe the co-flowering community. If you would like to know more, check out my draft of my project proposal!
Hello everyone,
My name i Alli Grecco, and this is my first Flog entry! I thought I would start by telling you a bit about myself. I grew up in Minnesota, and love being back to the beautiful prairies! But now I live in Chicago, and am a student at DePaul University. Please view my profile page here: https://echinaceaproject.org/people/2014-team-members/allison-grecco/
I am so excited to be a part of Team Echinacea 2014, and cannot wait for the exciting research and fun ahead!
The past two weeks have gone great for Team Echinacea. We finished up measuring seedlings in Q2, set up flags for P1 and Hegg lake, as well as marked flowering plants in P1 and other remnant populations. Although these weeks have been fairly laid back, the pace is about to pick up very quick. With Echinacea beginning to flower, there is a lot of work to be done, whether it be independent projects or adding data to larger, long-term projects. To sum up, we have a lot of work ahead of us, but that’s what we at Team Echinacea look forward to!
And on a lighter note, here is a picture of an awesome, mutant Echinacea plant which has two almost identical flowering heads emerging from the same peduncle. This is the first plant of its type seen since the start of the Echinacea Project. Sorry about the blurriness, but you can still get the general idea.
This morning started with Jared and I doing an inventory of the Hesperostipa spartea (porcupine grass) in experimental plot 1. We are interested in determining the fitness of each H. spartea. We went to each plant found during a systematic search. We determined how many seeds were present on each culm of each plant. We counted the number of full (having a viable seed), inviable (having a seed that would not reproduce), or unknown (a glume that was empty, or peduncle that had no glume) seeds for each plant and harvested ripe seeds for later plantings. We found one studly plant that had 14 culms and 58 seeds that were ready to harvest! After experimenting with several methods of tying the immature awns together (to make sure we could find the seeds once they are mature and drop), we determined the most effective way to retain the seeds is to tie the awns together with twist ties. We hope the twist tie method allows us to harvest seeds before they disperse. We tried several other methods for tying the awns together (tying the awns to the stem, tying the awns to a red flag, and tying the awns together) but twist ties appear to work the best. In the afternoon I tagged my first Echinacea (plant 1980)!
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