This experiment was designed to quantify how well Echinacea angustifolia populations are adapted to their local environments. In 2008, Amy Dykstra collected achenes from Echinacea populations in western South Dakota, central South Dakota, and Minnesota and then sowed seeds from all three sources into experimental plots near each collection site. Each year, Team Echinacea takes a demographic census at the western South Dakota and Minnesota plots; we abandoned the central South Dakota plot after it was inadvertently sprayed in 2009, killing all the Echinacea.
In 2022, during the annual census of the experimental plots, we found 135 living Echinacea plants, including 102 basal plants and 33 flowering plants. All but two of the flowering plants were in the South Dakota plot. A wetter-than-average spring may have contributed to the flowering output of these plants. The South Dakota prairies were as green as Amy can remember seeing.
- Start year: 2008
- Location: Grand River National Grassland (Western South Dakota), Samuel H. Ordway Prairie (Central South Dakota), Staffanson Prairie Preserve (West Central Minnesota), and Hegg Lake WMA (West Central Minnesota).
- Overlaps with: Dykstra’s interpopulation crosses
- Data collected: Plant fitness measurements (plant status, number of rosettes, number of leaves, and length of longest leaf)
- Samples collected: Heads from all flowering plants; Amy stores the heads in her office at Bethel University.
- Products: Dykstra, A. B. 2013. Seedling recruitment in fragmented populations of Echinacea angustifolia. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Minnesota. PDF
You can read more about Dykstra’s local adaptation experiment and see a map of the seed source sites on the background page for this experiment.
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