This Monday morning began with an unusual surprise. The team arrived at the Hjelm house to find numerous googly-eyes covering almost every conceivable surface. Upon recovering from this shock, the team assessed phenology in experimental plot 1. Many plants are finished flowering and we will likely only assess phenology a few more times this season. Following phenology, the team split up into task forces, with different members working on such diverse activities as staking bee tent trap locations, assessing the photosynthetic rate of Echinacea, excluding and adding aphids to plants in p1, and collecting more phenology data from from other Echinacea populations! The team reconvened for lunch, and in the afternoon went to a remnant Echinacea population for our first day of flowering plant demography. I had a chance to use Darwin, the team’s new GPS, for the first time!
A new variety of aphid?
In the evening, the Roost held its fifth weekly Journal Discussion Club. For our discussion this week, I chose “The Problem with Wilderness” by environmental historian William Cronon. This essay focuses on the historical development of wilderness preservation and its place in the American environmental movement. Our resulting discussion was rich, and even became heated at times. We’re looking forward to the paper Riley chose for next week on the life-history traits of non-native fishes.
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