My Last Day

Today was my last day of work with the Echinacea Project. We spent all of it doing total demo at Landfill and it was great! We had beautiful weather and many flowering individuals to investigate. In the morning the manager of the landfill came and talked with Stuart for a bit about the project and the remnants at the landfill. At lunch I gave the group a little presentation on my project for the summer. After another afternoon of total demo the Andes crew went into Alexandria for a night of wings.

Stuart pointing out where Echinacea are at Landfill for total demo.

Tracie, Anna, and Kristen doing total demo at Landfill.

My project this summer had several aspects to it. In the first part, I was curious to look into the plant community diversity between various types of land based on their land use history. At Hegg Lake Waterfowl Production Area there are remnants, restorations, and abandoned agricultural fields. I conducted vegetative analysis on several areas with these land use histories and I will be analyzing that data in the next couple weeks. Along with vegetative analysis, I also collected data on flowering resources between each type of land as a measure of pollinator habitat quality. Another aspect of my project was to build a list of species whose populations were large enough to collect seed from without heavily damaging the population. I built this list and gave it to the local DNR for their use. Along with the seed collection list, I am currently putting together a species list for all known species at Hegg Lake to provide for the DNR.

I learned a ton this summer and I am so happy to have had this amazing opportunity to participate in ecological science. There is so much fantastic research and good science coming out of the Echinacea Project. Thanks for everything!

-Wes