In 2023, the team continued the seedling recruitment experiment begun in 2007. The original goal of the project was to determine seedling establishment and growth rates in remnant populations of Echinacea angustifolia. Seedling recruitment rates are rarely studied in the field, and this is one of the few studies tracking recruitment in the tallgrass prairie. From 2007 to 2013 in spring, Team Echinacea visited plants which had flowered in the preceding year, and they searched near these maternal plants to find any emerging seedlings. Each fall since then, the team has searched for the seedlings, then juveniles, and measured them.
This year, we visited 51 focal maternal plants at 10 prairie remnants and searched for 86 sling plants, a subset of the original 955 seedlings. We completed sling in two days: September 15th and September 18th. Like last year, team members used the demo form to collect data on the visors, and we also shot any seedlings we could find that didn’t already have a GPS point. In total, the team found 47 basal plants and 5 flowering plants!
- Start year: 2007
- Location: Remnants in Douglas County, MN
- Sites with seedling searches in 2022: East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, KJ’s, Loeffler’s Corner, Landfill, Nessman, Riley, Steven’s Approach, South of Golf Course, Staffanson Prairie
- Overlaps with: Demographic census in the remnants
- Data collected:
- The data were collected on a visor using the demo form. The team recorded plant status (can’t find, basal, dead this year’s leaves, dead last year’s leaves, flowering), number of rosettes, leaf count, nearest neighbors, and head count, if flowering.
- Scanned datasheets are in Dropbox: ~Dropbox\remData\115_trackSeedlings\slingRefinds2023
- Physical copies of datasheets and maps can be found in the “Search For Sling 2023” black binder located currently in Hjelm on the back desk.
- Samples collected: NA
- Team members who searched for slings in 2022: Abby Widell, Ellysa Johnson, Jan Anderson, Lindsey Paulson.
- Products:
- Amy Dykstra used seedling survival data from 2010 and 2011 to model population growth rates as a part of her dissertation.
- Scott Nordstrom used some of the sling data in the paper “Fires slow population declines of a long-lived prairie plant through multiple vital rates” published in Oecologia (2021)
- Lea Richardson and Amy Waananen are both working on papers related to the sling dataset. Stay tuned!
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