A froggy friend visits Taylor during measuring today.
The team went out to the remnant sites this morning to assess phenology. Of the 1863 flowering heads from the remants this summer, only 26 are still flowering. Of these, 20 are in their “end flowering” phase, which means they only have a few days of flowering left. We finished doing all phenology, including p1 and p2 before 11 this morning. This is quite a contrast to a couple of weeks ago when pure phenology was an all-day job. We even had some time before lunch to clip sumac and Salix, two woody species which have crept into p1. At lunch we said goodbye to Stuart, who is flying to Baltimore for the ESA Annual Meeting. He will give a talk about the Echinacea Project tomorrow. After lunch we did a bit more land management work, pulling thistle and sweet clover from p8. After that much of the group headed back to p1 for more measuring. Today we measured plants that were planted in ’96, ’97, ’98. We contemplated the fact that many these plants are older than Will, Taylor, and Abby. Ali, Matt, and Ben went to Hegg to work on Ben’s independent project. They were testing different methods of seed collection (hand harvesting and using a seed sucker) on Galium. They came back with lots of seeds! This week we will continue measuring plants in p1 and working on independent projects.
