annual census underway

Team Echinacea has begun the annual census of Echinacea plants. Each year we census all flowering plants at over 30 prairie sites. Each plant gets a digital census record, a flag, and a tag. Most plants already have a tag, so we don’t give them a new one. But some have lost their tag or are flowering for the first time, so they need a new tag. New tags this year are numbered starting at 30,001. Plants get neon flags and we will come back and survey them so we can make a map of the location of every plant. Once they get surveyed, we replace the neon flag. All of these efforts help build a long-term dataset about the survival and reproduction of these very long-lived plants. These plants face many challenges living in small prairie patches, but they are tough.

Below is a summary of the number of census records taken so far at nine sites

   site              rawSite demo.id
1 other                            1
2   alf      around landfill      11
3    cg        common garden      23
4  eelr   east elk lake road      19
5   lfe        landfill east     118
6   lfw        landfill west      99
7   lce loeffler corner east      78
8   lcw loeffler corner west      81
9  rrxx    railroad crossing      36