Howdy Flog Followers,
After cleaning a whole bunch of seed-heads, I began the process of scanning.
Scanning is a rather simple process. Out of the 5 achene envelopes for each seed-head, the four envelopes containing achenes (excluding the chaff) are used. Each section is poured out onto a glass ‘sheet’, that is placed onto the scanner. I loaded each section with its corresponding label from the paper envelope, for identification and to avoid confusion between the different sections. In the image below, from the bottom to the top of the glass sheet the achene sections : top, middle, bottom, other. The middle section is the most noticeable, as it normally has the largest number of achenes.
After all the achenes are placed onto the glass sheet, a cover is placed over the sheet, for the sake of darkness. Then the scanning can commence! Each resulting scan looks similar to the second image, on the computer screen.
Lastly, it is important to have a specific place to save all of the scans to. I have saved all of the extreme scans to the ‘EchinaceaCG2016’ Folder, under the I Drive. This way, everyone (including yourself) will be able to find your hard work.
The scanned images are then used to count all of the seeds found on that specific seed-head. Specifically, the seeds are counted in reference to their category (top, middle, bottom, or other), which can be combined for a total count value. As a result, we are able to compare the sizes of the seed-heads, based on achene count.
‘Till next time folks,
Nicolette McManus
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