With over 15 years of data, the study of Echinacea demography is among the Echinacea Project’s longest running research projects. During demography, Team Echinacea maps and collects basic demographic information about plants within 30 prairie remnants. In 2014 we collected demographic information for over 500 individual plants including 179 flowering plants at our largest site, Staffanson Prairie Preserve, alone. Across the other 29 sites, we found 897 flowering plants and visited a total of 1226 plants. For each plant visited, we recorded whether the plant was alive, whether the plant was flowering, and how many flowering heads it produced. With this extensive dataset, we hope to explore inter-annual flowering patterns, assess longitudinal plant fitness, and monitor numerical population dynamics in remnant populations of Echinacea.
Read previous posts about this experiment.
Start year: 1995
Location: 30 remnants prairies
Products: Stuart, Jared, and Gretel are working to clean, organize, and integrate demography, survey, and phenology data (project “demap”). Also see the demography protocol.
Overlaps with: fire and flowering at SPP
