After working on my analysis for a few days I have realized that whether or not the head is unique to an Echinacea plant does not affect the malo curve for the individual head, or in real world terms, it doesn’t affect the flowering schedule of the head. This conclusion brought up two more questions.
The first question I have is what, if anything, explains the variations in the malo curve for the head if its uniqueness to the plant doesn’t. To try to answer this question I will be investigating is including the population of origin for the plant and the year it was planted in the investigation. I hope that this information will shed some light on the variations in the malo curves.
The second questions I have is how do multiple heads on an Echinacea plant interact to form the malo curve of the plant as a whole. The first thing I did was graph all the heads on a common plant on the same graph, which produced a lot of variation.
Two heads with no overlap.
Two heads with almost complete overlap.
A plant with 6 heads!
Now that I’ve visualized the differences in the data, I’m excited by all the variation that I see. My next step is to produce malo curves for the plants as a whole and start an analysis. With two viable paths of investigation, I’m expecting a lot of work in the next few days.
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