This field season, the team continued the seedling recruitment experiment begun in 2007. The original goal of the project was to determine seedling establishment and growth rates in remnant populations of Echinacea angustifolia. Seedling recruitment rates are rarely studied in the field, and this is one of the few studies tracking recruitment in the tallgrass prairie. From 2007 to 2013 in spring, Team Echinacea visited plants which had flowered in the preceding year, and they searched near these maternal plants to find any emerging seedlings. Each fall since then, the team has searched for the seedlings, then juveniles, and measured them.
In 2021, Team Echinacea visited a subset of the sling plants at 12 prairie remnants from September 21st to September 29th. The team visited 62 focal maternal plants and searched for 117 sling plants of the original 955 seedlings. In total, the team found 49 basal plants, 2 dead this year’s leaves, 3 dead last year’s leaves, and 3 flowering plants! One of these heads, tag 18136 from East Elk Lake Road, was harvested and is currently being cleaned in the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The team did not find the remaining 60 sling plants, and 17 of these plants have not been found for the past 3 years, so they will not be visited in 2022. No slings have been found at East of Town Hall and Northwest of Landfill for the past three years, so the team will not visit these sites in 2022. Unfortunately, after a long, dry summer, many of the plants were crispy and hard to see, especially at Riley and East Riley. Next year, the team should start hunting for slings earlier while they are still green.
This year, Team Echinacea used the visor demo form to collect data and assigned locs 301-474 to the sling plants to relate the demo form to the sling ids. To aid in finding plants next year, team members gave at tag to 53 sling plants and shot a GPS point for each tagged plant. These GPS points will then be added to the stakefile for 2022.
Over the course of 5 days, 6 people spent 1980 minutes (33 person-hours) collecting data for the sling project this summer.
Mia hikes out to visit the slings at Staffanson Prairie West
Start year: 2007
Location: Remnants in Douglas County, MN
Sites with seedling searches: East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, East of Town Hall, KJ’s, Loeffler’s Corner, Landfill, Nessman, Northwest of Landfill, Riley, Steven’s Approach, South of Golf Course, Staffanson Prairie
The data were collected on a visor using the demo form. The team recorded plant status (can’t find, basal, dead this year’s leaves, dead last year’s leaves, flowering), number of rosettes, leaf count, nearest neighbors, and head count, if flowering.
The 2021 sling materials such as maps and scanned datasheets are here: “Dropbox\burnRem\remData\115_trackSeedlings\slingRefinds2021”
The 2021 data from the demo form are here: “Dropbox\burnRem\remData\115_trackSeedlings\slingRefinds2021\slingRefindsData2021.csv”
The 2021 stakefile can be found here: “Dropbox\geospatialDataBackup2021\stakeFiles2021\sling2021stakeV.01.csv”
Samples or specimens collected: One head from East Elk Lake Road was harvested and is currently housed with the rest of the 2021 remnant harvest at the Chicago Botanic Garden
Team members who searched for slings in 2021: Amy Waananen, Ruth Shaw, Mia Stevens, Stuart Wagenius, Jared Beck, Alex Carroll
Products:
Amy Dykstra used seedling survival data from 2010 and 2011 to model population growth rates as a part of her dissertation.
Lea Richardson and Amy Waananen are both working on papers related to the sling dataset. Stay tuned!
You can read more about the seedling establishment experiment, as well as links to prior flog entries about this experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
Today, the Lake Forest College students returned for their second day at the lab. After cleaning heads last week, they moved on to the next steps of the ACE process today: quality control and scanning. They worked in teams of two, so one group rechecked cleaned heads from rem2020 and rem2021 while the other group scanned the achenes that had passed the quality control step. The students will have a dataset of 40 echinacea heads from 2021, 20 burned and 20 unburned, as well as 40 heads from 2020. They wondered whether the drought this summer affected seed production in echinacea or whether controlled burns influence achene count, and they developed hypotheses to test these questions.
Alondra and Marina do quality control while Maeve and Connor scan achenes
The new x-ray machine also arrived this week! It showed up in an enormous wooden crate, but fortunately the machine itself is not that large. Today, the company representatives gave us a tutorial of how to operate the x-ray. We will need to do some trials to find the best settings and adjust our protocol to the new machine. For example, we will need smaller sheets of paper to fit in the x-ray. Based on today’s test run, it seems that the x-ray can only hold 15 bags of achenes (3 rows of 5) at a time instead of 20 bags (4 rows of 5). However, each image takes only 45 seconds, so hopefully it won’t slow down the process too much. According to the Kubtec website, this model is also good at x-raying explosives, art, and gems, so I guess that might come in handy, too.
Today, we welcomed four undergraduate students from Lake Forest College: Alondra, Connor, Maeve, and Marina. As part of their plant biology class, they will conduct a project related to fire’s effect on echinacea reproduction. At the lab, they will gain hands-on experience for three Wednesday afternoons, and their project will culminate with a poster presentation. Today, everyone learned how to clean heads from the rem 2021 harvest. Next week, they will develop their hypotheses and hopefully practice scanning and counting achenes from remnant echinacea populations.
Jared gives a crash course in echinacea reproduction
Lake Forest College students clean rem 2021 heads
Mosaic cube
This evening after dark, several of us attended the Chicago Botanic Garden’s annual lightshow, called Lightscape. At night, the garden was completely transformed by holiday music, elaborate sculptures, a laser show, and even a glowing ball of yarn. It was quite impressive!
What sort of radioactive fertilizer have they been using?
Visiting Minnesota to plant seeds last week was a welcome break from sitting at a desk all day. However, we were glad to be back in the lab this week. On Thursday, I finished the inventory of the remnant 2021 heads, so they are now ready to be cleaned by volunteers.
We have a great crew of volunteers this fall. Suzanne wins the award for the longest volunteer record; she has been helping the Echinacea Project since 1999! In contrast, Elif joined the lab in 2019 and is our newest volunteer. So far, all of the volunteers have been cleaning seed heads, an important early step in the ACE workflow. However, many of them specialize in other steps of the process such as quality control, scanning, randomization, weighing, x-raying, counting, or classifying. Once we have made a dent in the backlog of seed heads, the volunteers will be able to diversify and find the steps that they enjoy most.
Marty is an expert at the scanner and x-ray machine
Elif started in 2019 has only cleaned heads so far
Mike has pinned all the bees for the Yellow Pan Trap project
We have yet to discover Luk’s favorite job!
Suzanne specializes at inventory and randomization
Allen is a pro at counting and classifying achenes
Our other project this week was to clean out the freezer in the lab. The freezer mainly contained coolers of empty vials that were used to collect bees for the Yellow Pan Trap (YPT) project. As Mia and I sorted through the vials, we also discovered one cooler that still contained bees! Why were these bees collected? To what project do they belong? Why haven’t they been pinned like all the other bees? According to Detective Stuart, “We have a mystery to solve. First stage is to gather evidence. (Don’t disturb the scene of the crime.)” I followed Stuart’s instructions and returned the cooler to the freezer. After doing some sleuthing, I now suspect that vial GQ-9417 contains YPT specimens that were collected on 31 July 2019. The other vials, however, remain a mystery. If anyone can identify the suspects or has information about the day of the crime, 16 July 2019, please let me know.
Mia, Marty, Allen, and Stuart hard at work in the lab
On Monday, we welcomed back our second volunteer of the season, Marty. Marty is an expert on the scanner and x-ray, but since the new x-ray machine hasn’t arrived yet, she and Allen have been our rockstar head cleaners. So far, it has taken 22 person hours to clean 85 echinacea heads. Based on these numbers, it will take an additional 56 hours to finish cleaning the 216 remaining heads in the 2020 burn rem batch that we’re currently working on. If the volunteers continue to work at this rate, cleaning this batch would be completed by next Tuesday, October 26. In preparation for future head cleaning, we emptied out the seed dryer and refilled it with gbags from the 2021 harvest.
To celebrate several birthdays this month, Mia baked cupcakes for us! They were very chocolatey and delicious. We even made some new friends in the Plant Conservation Science Building by offering them cupcakes.
Last week, we wrapped up the last of the fieldwork in Minnesota, although four Liatris plants are taking their sweet time and weren’t ready to harvest on Friday. The remaining members of Team Echinacea packed their bags and headed to the Chicago Botanic Garden, with the exception of Jared, who is staying to monitor the stubborn Liatris. Previously, I had never been to the Garden before, so it’s been a fun place to explore. I’ve also enjoyed the elaborate Halloween decorations in the neighborhood.
A familiar crime?Clowning around with the Grinch
This week at the Botanic Garden, we welcomed back Allen, our first volunteer since the beginning of the pandemic. It will be terrific to have some experienced volunteers to process the backlog of echinacea heads from the past several years.
At the lab, we’re also preparing for the seed addition experiment. Today, Wyatt trained us in on the seed blower, a contraption that separates light achenes from heavy ones. The heavy (rich) achenes should contain seeds, and we will next randomize the rich achenes for planting this fall. We need 12,800 seeds for the experiment, and after several trials with the seed blower, we estimate that we should have enough.
This morning (Wednesday), I got a bit of a late start because I made a double-batch apple crisp this morning, and the apples weren’t quite cooked yet. For the crisp, I used combination of northwest greening and haralred apples from the trees around Hjelm, and Mia and Wesley kindly helped me slice up the mountainous 8 cups of apples. When the crisp had finally cooked, I met up with Mia and Wesley, who had just finished adding stapes in p1. (check!)
Wednesday morning apple crisp
Next, Wesley and I headed out with Collins to finish up total demo at tplot and shoot a few more flowering plants at hegg in an area which is being renamed nrpal, or near pallida. Total demo is now done! (check!)
Bottle gentian at hegg
After lunch, Wesley and I tackled the remainder of the Andropogon harvest sites. Our record was a plot at kjs with 163 Andropogon culms! Andropogon harvests are now complete. (check!)
Daily Andropogon haul
In the evening, we had another bonfire, and we were joined by Stuart’s parents. The rest of the crew cooked up some fabulous breakfast burritos for dinner, crowned with Mia’s famous pickled red onions. The wind had been gusting all afternoon, and now it pitched in to help fan the flames of the bonfire, which caught rapidly. We ended the day with some delicious home-grown apple crisp!
We’ve been missing Laura, John, and Kennedy this week, but we’ve had to forge ahead without them. Today, Mia and Wesley finished rechecks while I staked random points at nice, eth, and koons for our Andropogon expedition later in the day. After staking, I met with Stuart to learn some R-Studio data wrangling skills. At lunch, Wesley reported on the Liatris pollinator observations – the team conducted 95 total observations this summer and mapped over 2,500 plants!
Wesley with the original Liatris plant: LA1
After lunch, we learned a new protocol for harvesting Andropogon gerardii (big bluestem). We visited a third of the random points at each site and counted and harvested all the Andropogon culms within one meter of the point. Jared and I collected three full bags of Andropogon at East Riley, a site which had been burned, but we didn’t find a single culm at the other sites (spp and on27).
Jared searching for Andropogon at Staffanson
After work, the Elk Lake house spent all evening cooking up a giant batch of Wesley’s peanut noodles in preparation for the bonfire tomorrow night. Mia wisely used the food processor to grate the carrots, so no fingers were lost. We doubled the recipe, so there were an awful lot of carrots!
This was my first week with the Echinacea Project, and I feel like I have big shoes to fill after all the fantastic team members earlier this summer. It’s been an eventful week, and I think I’ve seen more Liatris plants than Echinacea so far.
Laura, Alex, and Darwin flagging Liatris
This week, the team focused on completing the project to map the Liatris aspera plants at all the sites. We spent a lot of time at Koons Hill, which supposedly had only 200 plants, but we found over 600! For the first time all summer, the team had to contend with rain, but we finally finished rechecking Koons Hill today, and we revisited all the sites to pull the neon flags, which had formerly marked the Liatris plants.
Wesley, Collins, and Kennedy braving the rain
We weren’t the only ones visiting the Liatris plants. This afternoon, we spotted numerous pollinators, including several bumblebees and a monarch, which were enjoying a sweet nectar treat.
Bumblebees on LiatrisMonarch on Liatris
At the end of the day, the wasps wanted to share our sweet cantaloupe as well, but fortunately, Wesley devised a system involving a tupperware and some ice packs, which encouraged them to chill out.
B.A. in Biology and Environmental Science, University of Minnesota-Morris, 2021
Research Interests
I am interested in studying plant-insect interactions such as the role of pollination in plant fitness, and I’m curious what characteristics of fire make it so beneficial for prairie plants.
Statement
I am originally from St. Paul, MN, but I’ve spent a lot of time in the land of prairies because I just graduated from college in Morris. In my spare time, I can be found climbing trees, baking cheesecake, and peering at the undersides of leaves looking for insects. At the moment, my favorite insect is the brown mantidfly (Climaciella brunnea).
