One of our main goals over the past two years has been to process all of the Echinacea harvested from remnants in 2020, 2021, and 2022 to investigate the effects of prescribed fire on flowering and fitness. We harvested 1,012 heads over these three years.
year
# of heads
rem2020
299
rem2021
383
rem2022
330
For each head, the end goal is to get an accurate count of the number of achenes and the seed set, a measure of pollination success. To collect these data, we sent the Echinacea through our high-throughput seed processing system, which we call the ACE process. (The true meaning of ACE is controversial: Always Cleaning Echinacea? Accurately Counting Echinacea? Achene Chaos Extraordinaire?) The ACE process has many steps: inventory, clean, recheck, scan, count, randomize, x-ray, classify, store.
In spring 2023, we finished processing all of the remnant Echinacea from 2020, 2021, and 2022! We send a huge thank you to all the students and volunteers who put in many hours on this project over the last few years. We couldn’t have done it without you!
Luk and Sue cleanWanying and Caitlin recheckLake Forest College students recheck and scanKat scansAllen countsPriti randomizesMarty, Char, Padmini, Caroline, and Allen agree: it’s a team effort!
Jared is currently adding the achene count and seed set data to the remnant data repository on the Echinacea Project website. All achenes are currently in the dehumidifier at the Chicago Botanic Garden. After two weeks of drying, they can be stored in the seed bank.
Pollinators are declining worldwide, a phenomenon that some people are calling the insect apocalypse. There are many factors driving these population declines, and loss of habitat has been identified as one major cause of insect demise. In our study area in western Minnesota, we have seen numerous prairie patches converted to agriculture over the years. However, we don’t know how the bee community has changed over time across the landscape. To investigate these questions, the Echinacea Project started the Pollinators on Roadsides project back in 2004, and we collected another year of data this past summer. In the fall, we brought 7 coolers of insects back to the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
This winter and spring, volunteer Mike has been busy as a bee pinning all the specimens so we can send them to Zach Portman, a bee taxonomist at the University of Minnesota. This week, Mike started working on the last cooler of bees! So far, he’s pinned 680 insects collected in 2022.
The 610th bee from summer 2022Mike shows off the 2022 bee collection
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR). The Trust Fund is a permanent fund constitutionally established by the citizens of Minnesota to assist in the protection, conservation, preservation, and enhancement of the state’s air, water, land, fish, wildlife, and other natural resources.
Happy Spring! Yesterday was the equinox, so now it’s officially in spring. It has been an unseasonably warm winter in Chicago, so it has felt like spring for several weeks here already. Lindsey and I spotted snowdrops flowering at the Morton Arboretum back on February 18. Here at the Botanic Garden, the winter aconite and crocus plants and are currently in bloom. The skunk cabbages are also looking spiffy.
February snowdropsUp-close and personal crocusCheery winter aconite
In contrast, Minnesota has experienced the eighth snowiest winter on record, and our field site was buried under >1 foot of snow all winter. The snow still hasn’t all melted, so it will be a few weeks before the spring ephemerals make an appearance. Hopefully, we’ll get to experience spring twice: once in Illinois and once in Minnesota!
Skunk cabbage!The skunk cabbage is well camouflaged
The Echinacea Project is seeking collaborators interested in studying the ecological effects of fire within a highly fragmented prairie landscape. In 2021, we began experimentally burning patches of remnant prairie in western Minnesota to investigate how fire effects on plant reproduction and population dynamics may be mediated by fragmentation. In 2023, we are expanding our efforts to study fire and fragmentation effects on plant-pollinator interactions and ground-nesting bees in remnant and restored prairies. We hope to collaborate with other researchers who can capitalize on our landscape-scale experiment to address these and other ecological questions about effects of fire and fragmentation in tallgrass prairie. Please share with anyone you think may be interested!
We will host a brief informational Zoom meeting on February 22 at 10:30 AM CDT to share information about the experimental design and potential opportunities for collaboration. If you are interested in attending the informational meeting, send us an email (EchinaceaProject [at] gmail.com) and we will share a link to the Zoom meeting. If you are unable to attend live, we plan to record the informational meeting and can make this recording available.
see the “Phases” section about Kuhn’s phases of paradigm change
Discussion questions:
What paradigm shifts have occurred in the fields of ecology and plant science? Have any occurred recently?
Conversely, have you observed new research in the field becoming less disruptive over time? If so, do you agree with the authors’ suggestion that this can be attributed to researchers focusing on “narrower slices of previous work”? (142)
What is your perception of the paper’s measure of disruptiveness (CD5)? What might be some strengths and weaknesses of this approach?
Do the popular media pieces effectively communicate the paper’s findings to a general audience? What angles do they take in their explainers, and why?
Though papers have become less disruptive on average, the quantity of disruptive papers has remained largely consistent. Do you agree with the paper’s proposal of a carrying capacity for highly disruptive papers?
Is a decline in disruptiveness exclusively a bad thing? Consider Kuhn’s ideas on “paradigms.”
This experiment was designed to quantify how well Echinaceaangustifolia 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.
Pictured is one of the flowering plants in the South Dakota plot. We performed the census on June 30, before the flowering heads started dehiscing pollen.
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).
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.
Small remnant Echinacea populations may suffer from inbreeding depression. To assess whether gene flow (in the form of pollen) from another population could “rescue” these populations from inbreeding depression, we hand-pollinated Echinacea from six different prairie remnants with pollen from a large prairie remnant (Staffanson Prairie) and from a relatively small population (Northwest Landfill) in 2008. We also performed within-population crosses as a control. Amy Dykstra (with help from Caroline Ridley) planted the achenes (seeds) that resulted from these crosses in an experimental plot at Hegg Lake WMA.
We sowed a total of 15,491 achenes in 2008. 449 of these achenes germinated and emerged as seedlings. Each summer, we census the surviving plants and measure them.
In 2022, we found 26 surviving plants; all were basal. Joey McGarry staked the plant locations, Amy Dykstra searched for the plants, and Brad Dykstra recorded the data.
Data collected: Plant fitness measurements (plant status, number of rosettes, number of leaves, and length of longest leaf), and notes about herbivory. Contact Amy Dykstra to access this data.
Samples collected: NA
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 interpopulation crosses, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
In summer 2022, Team Echinacea continued the aphid addition and exclusion experiment started in 2011 by Katherine Muller. The original experiment included 100 plants selected from exPt01 which were each assigned to have aphids either added or excluded through multiple years. The intention is to assess the impact of the specialist herbivore Aphis echinaceae on Echinacea fitness.
In 2022, Emma Reineke and Kennedy Porter conducted the aphid addition and exclusion project. They located 24 living exclusion plants and 17 living addition plants. Similar to the past two years, they did not find any aphids in exPt01, so they started to introduce a new population of Aphid echinaeceae into ExPt1. Learn more in the summer aphid update.
Kennedy and Emma with their aphids (credit: Emma)Ants tend aphids on a leaf (credit: Emma)
Plant status (basal, flowering, not present), aphids present, ants present, herbivory (number of leaves significantly chewed on), and the number of aphids added/removed (depending on specific treatment)
Protocols and datasheets are located at ~Dropbox\aphidAddEx\aphids2022
Samples collected: NA
Products:
Andy Hoyt’s poster presented at the Fall 2018 Research Symposium at Carleton College
2016 paper by Katherine Muller and Stuart on aphids and foliar herbivory damage on Echinacea
2015 paper by Ruth Shaw and Stuart on fitness and demographic consequences of aphid loads
You can read more about the aphid addition and exclusion experiment, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
In summer 2021, Team Dust began a project to look at the effect of dust on reproduction of Echinacea. They randomly assigned treatments of ‘dust’ or ‘no dust’ to 41 heads in ExPt2. Many heads were eaten by ground squirrels, but they harvested the 18 survivors, and Amy Waananen x-rayed the achenes from these heads in March 2022 to evaluate seed set.
This summer, Emma Reineke took the lead on the project, assisted by Kennedy Porter. They applied dust treatments to 64 Echinacea heads at a prairie remnant, Nice Island. They also conducted an observational study using dust traps to measure dust levels at varying distances from unpaved roads. Learn more in Team Dust’s summer update. In late summer, the team harvested the 64 heads, and Amy now has them at UMN. Emma recently received UROP (undergraduate research opportunities program) funding to continue research on the dust project during spring semester.
Emma applies dust to an Echinacea head (credit: Emma)A dust trap (credit: Emma)
Start year: 2021
Location: ExPt2 and Nice Island
Overlaps with: None
Data collected:
Relative amounts of dust levels along unpaved roads at Aanenson and Riley
Datasheets are located at ~Dropbox\teamEchinacea2022\emmaReineke\Dust 2022
Samples or specimens collected:
We collected 64 heads, which are currently in the R. Shaw Lab in the Ecology building at UMN.
