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We began this morning at 8:30 am with most of the team heading out to observe pollinators, however no pollinators were seen because it was so cold and rainy! While the rest of the team was watching for pollinators Abby and I worked on crossing in the west unit of the Staffanson Prairie preserve as part of the compatibility experiment! When it started to rain the team gave up on pollinators but, Will, who very generously drove us to Staffanson came and helped us finish the crossing so that we didn’t have to sit out in the rain by ourselves.
 Abby is worried about the aphids drowning in the rain so she retreats into her shell. After failing to see any pollinators this morning the team went out to P1 to work on the aphid exclusion and addition experiment. Under the strict guidance of Abby, our resident aphid expert, we quickly finished adding and removing aphids from the 70 plants that are part of the experiment!
Will is waiting to start playing Catan, he is so excited. We had plans to measure the plants in P2 in the afternoon but the cold rainy weather would have made that difficult. Stuart gave us the afternoon off to work on proposals and relax; Will, James, Lea and I decided to focus on the relaxation part and play a friendly game of Settlers of Catan. James and I consider ourselves to be experts at this game, as we have played it many times.
“I have memorized the rule book so you don’t need to read it Will” – James 2016
The game lasted a long time and Lea did a really good job of stealing all of Will’s brick cards. In the end Will narrowly beat me. I am pretty salty about the whole ordeal because I really like to win, but Will is just really good at board games I guess.
Signing off –
AMW
Happy Independence Day, flog readers! The team had the day off today, but that didn’t stop Leah, Scott, and I from doing a little fieldwork this morning. Leah and Scott caught pollinators and worked on Leah’s co-flowering study while I painted and bagged heads at Around Landfill in preparation for crossing tomorrow as part of the compatibility experiment.
We honored the holiday this evening in Alexandria, the so-called birthplace of America. After eating a traditional American meal of Chinese buffet food, we went to a concert on the lawn of the Douglas County courthouse. Here we heard many patriotic tunes such as “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America.” We took the scenic route back to Kensington and admired the clouds the entire way. Finally, we stopped at the Kensington Runestone Park to visit the true birthplace of America, where a Viking expedition left a runestone all the way back in 1363. The runestone doesn’t say what date it was engraved so it’s tough to say whether July 4th is actually America’s birthday, but that would be quite a coincidence. Either way today was a great day!
 “Everything is awesome! The clouds are so cool!”- at the birthplace of America
 Alex and Leah with one of the first flowering plants of the season! Happy Stir-Friday, everybody! We had a very productive day here in Kensington. More and more plants are flowering in the remnants, and we started out the morning by assessing phenology at the Riley and East Riley sites. From there we split into groups to check on flowering plants in the other remnants. The team convened for lunch, then split into smaller groups again. Leah, Alex, and I went to the Landfill sites to flag and do phenology. After that, we came back and found more q2 seedlings.
Gretel, Will, Lea, and James went to p2 to tackle flagging and doing phenology there. Word on the street is that it will be another big year for flowering at p2, but fewer than last year. We’ll see! Meanwhile, Scott, Stuart, Alyson, and Laura collected Stipa in p1. While doing so, they discovered that something or someone has been eating the Stipa! Why?! How?! It is so pokey! Current hypotheses propose that deer have been browsing, but the motivation they would have for eating a grass with such bad mouthfeel is unclear.
We finished the day with rootbeer floats. Yum! And because it was stir Fry-day at Town Hall, Alex made us all a tasty stir-fry for dinner. We’re looking forward to a fun weekend and the busy weeks ahead with increased flowering, pollinator observations, and more!
In 2014, members of Team Echinacea did an experiment to test methods of removing Hawkweed. Last year Ali assessed the results of the different methods that they used: cutting the head and painting the stem with herbicide, painting the leaves with herbicide, hand pulling with and without tools, and a control treatment. You can read her post describing the experiment and with the results from 2015 update here and the original post with methods here.
I went back to the treatment plots this morning and assessed Hawkweed percent cover two years after the treatment. The plots with the lowest percent cover this year were those where they removed hawkweed by hand, with tools. These plots also had the smallest percent change from 2015 to 2016, indicating lasting effects of removal. This was in contrast to those that had been treated by painting leaves with herbicide, where plots had an average of 4x increase in Hawkweed. From now on, we’ll use this method to remove Hawkweed in P1. We’ll assess percent cover in the treatment plots and the status of other Hawkweed plants in p1 to keep track of our progress at eradicating Hawkweed from the common garden.
Here’s the percent cover data from this year:
hawkweedData2016
We started our second day of the field season with tour of Hegg Lake Wildlife Management Area. Stuart told us about the natural history of the area and we observed how management decisions and land use can impact plant communities. Some changes are obvious: Stuart pointed out that the landscape 200 years ago would have been mostly treeless, but now they are abundant between the agricultural fields that cover majority of the region. Other changes are more subtle: we saw a population of Echinacea at Hegg that were much further along in flowering than any others we had seen, but soon learned that these Echinacea were actually a different species–Echinacea pallida, which are not native to this area. Not all human-plant interactions are negative though! In certain areas we saw a large diversity of native plants, some of which were restored and others which persisted despite disturbance, and we finished up our tour of Hegg Lake WMA with a visit to p2, Jennifer’s experimental plot. This summer we will work in the p2 to answer questions about flowering phenology, pollination, and fitness.
 James, Ruth, and Gretel after setting up flags in p8 At lunch, we heard from Ruth about the quantitative genetics experiment (which we call qGen_1, 2, and 3), which aims to test Fischer’s Fundamental Theorem of Evolution in natural populations. After lunch, Lea, Will, Ruth, and I went to set up flags and get ready to measure the youngest cohorts of the qGen experiments. The rest of the group went out to visit other remnant populations and learn more about the lay of the land. Tomorrow we’ll collect the first data for the 2016 field season, when we search for seedlings from the qGen_3 experiment that was planted last fall. Fingers crossed for good weather and lots of seedlings!
 Yellow Ladyslipper (Cypripedium parviflorum) at Hegg Lake Other notable events from 15 June 2016:
- “What is wind? I’m really flustered as to where it starts. Where does it start?” and “Does wind make noise?” were hot questions on the brains of all team members this morning.
- We saw a sandhill crane and some really neat yellow ladyslippers at Hegg Lake.
- I saw a little baby deer sleeping in p1 when we were putting up signs! It was very cute but unfortunately it ran away when Will walked over to take a picture.
Echinacea Project 2016
Biology, St. Olaf College 2015
Research Interests
I’m interested in when Echinacea plants flower and what that means for individuals’ opportunities to mate. Could it be that individuals are flowering in the right place but at the wrong time? We’ll be trying to find out! I’m also interested which plants are compatible with each other and will be doing a crossing experiment to assess the degree of compatibility in remnant populations.
Statement
I am from Maple Grove, Minnesota, a northwest burb of the Twin Cities. I like to run, garden, and bake. I’m happy to be returning to K-town this summer, and in particular I’m looking forward to swimming in Elk Lake and cooking with folks in Town Hall.
 Here’s me with a carrot!
We had a great turnout for our annual lab potluck yesterday. Good times were had by all as we heard updates about what the lab accomplished this past year. Here are some highlights:
- This year, Bob and Aldo counted their 250,000th achenes. Anne counted her 400,000th, and Bill counted his 500,000th. Just yesterday morning, Lois, our reigning “achene queen,” counted her 700,000th!
- We finished doing all the hands-on work for 2014 and have already made great progress on cleaning and randomizing heads from the 2015 harvest.
- Stuart summarized progress and preliminary analyses of the qGen_a experiment, which tests for the heritability of fitness traits in Echinacea.
- The lab interns, Rachael, Gordon, Danny, and I, talked about our independent projects, all of which push the frontiers of science!
- We talked about plans for this summer. While Stuart, Gretel, and I head back to Minnesota, Danny and our citizen scientists will be busy in the lab cleaning last year’s (huge) harvest from Experimental Plot 2 and counting experiments from 2015. They’ll be joined by Chris, a MS student at Northwestern who will help get our (many) achenes organized for storage in the seed bank.
- There were too many tasty dishes to name all of the ones I enjoyed here. However, as a sampling, there was homemade spinach dip, mashed sweet potatoes, several broccoli dishes, iced tea, and a rhubarb crisp, which we polished off.
We took a group photo:
 First row (L to R): Aldo, Gretel, Lois, Shelley, Char, Stuart; Second row: Art, Amy, Susie; Third row: Danny, Sarah, Kathryn, Susan; Fourth row: Rachael, Gordon, Bill, Suzanne; Not pictured: Anne, Bob, Laura, Leslie, Marty, Sam, and interns Mackenzie, Keke, and Nina Thanks for coming, those of you who could make it, and for a great year!
 Illustration by Jeremie Fant Cirsium hillii (Hill’s thistle), like Echinacea, is a native, self-incompatible, prairie species that grows in high, dry soils. However, Hill’s thistle is listed as a Species of Special Concern in Minnesota and little is known about how it responds to fire. We study effects of fire on the fitness of C. hillii plants at Hegg Lake WMA. Burn and non-burn units were designated prior to an experimental fall burn conducted by the DNR in 2014. That year, we mapped 28 C. hillii plants (basal and flowering) in those plots.
Following the burn in summer 2015, there were two flowering C. hillii individuals. Team Echinacea assessed survival and collected tissue samples from plants for analysis by Abbey White, a MS student in Northwestern’s Plant Biology and Conservation Program. Abbey used microsatellite markers to describe patterns of genetic diversity across the Midwestern range of C. hillii and determine if inbreeding or clonal growth contribute to the low seed set observed in the region. So far she has seen evidence for a lot of clonal growth. This has a direct application to the restoration of C. hillii since the number of plants we see may not be representative of the number of genetic individuals in the population.
We will revisit plants annual to assess their survival and reproduction.
Start year: 2014
Site: Hegg Lake WMA
Overlaps with: fire and flowering at Staffanson Prairie Preserve
 Plenty of basal leaves but no flowering in Amy Dykstra’s local adaptation experimental plots in 2015 In 2008, Amy Dykstra began an experiment to study how adapted Echinacea populations are to their local environments. She collected achenes from three populations distributed across a wide section of Echinacea angustifolia’s range, from Western South Dakota to our study site in Western Minnesota. She established a plot near each collection site where she sowed achenes from all sites. Since then, Amy has assessed survival and fitness traits of the individuals in her plots annually.
Amy expected to see increasing proportions of achenes emerging as seedlings with decreasing distance between the seed source and the sowing site. Instead she found that seedling emergence increased by sowing site from western to central South Dakota to Minnesota, and that at each site achenes from Minnesota and western South Dakota had higher seedling emergence than those collected at the central South Dakota site. This result suggests that there isn’t evidence of local adaptation in Echinacea seedling establishment, but that source population matters, potentially due to maternal effects.
After six years of tracking survival to fitness, however, there is some indication that local adaptation may play a role in later life stages. No individuals have flowered yet in any of the plots, which is somewhat surprising for Echinacea angustifolia individuals which are typically 5-7 years old before flowering for the first time. Amy will continue this study in 2016, so stay tuned for updates!
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
Team members who have worked on this project: Amy Dykstra, flog posts written by Amy may provide additional detail about activities associated the the development and continuing progress on this project.
Echinacea pallida, a non-native Echinacea species that is compatible with E. angustifolia, was planted at a restoration at Hegg Lake WMA. One aspect of the potential that E. pallida has to interact with E. angustifolia individuals is the synchrony of their flowering timing, or phenology. To study this, we have kept track of the start and end dates of flowering for Echinacea pallida individuals in the Hegg restoration plot since 2011. In 2015, we identified 48 flowering plants with 139 heads. Flowering began on June 30th. Then, on July 15th, we chopped off all the Echinacea pallida heads. Before this date, 34 individuals flowered.
 Flowering schedule and map of Echinacea pallida at Hegg WMA. Note the abrupt end of flowering on July 15th. Click to enlarge! Read more about this experiment.
Start year: 2011
Site: Hegg Lake WMA restoration
Products: In Fall 2013, Aaron and Grace, externs from Carleton College, investigated hybridization potential by analyzing the phenology and seed set of Echinacea pallida and neighboring Echinacea angustifolia that Dayvis collected in summer 2013. They wrote a report of their study.
Overlaps with: Echinacea hybrids (exPt6, exPt7, exPt9), flowering phenology in remnants
Previous team members who have worked on this project include: Nicholas Goldsmith (2011), Shona Sanford-Long (2012), Dayvis Blasini (2013), and Cam Shorb (2014)
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