This field season the team continued the seedling
recruitment experiment begun in 2007. The original goal of the project was to
determine the rates of establishment and growth of seedlings in remnant
populations of Echinacea angustifolia.
From 2007 to 2013, plants which had flowered in the preceding year were visited
in the spring to find any resulting seedlings. Each fall since then the team
visits the plants, re-finds the seedlings and measures the living offspring.
In 2019 Team Echinacea visited 69 focal maternal plants in
12 prairie remnants to determine the survival and growth of their offspring.
The team searched for 128 of the original 955 seedlings and found 87 of them
(10 fewer than were found in 2018.) However, the team also re-found 27 seedlings
which could not be located in 2018. None of the original seedlings flowered
this year.
In addition to the annual seedling search, in 2019 the team
began working on a project to relate the fitness and mating scene of maternal
plants to their offspring. In late October 2019, Erin and Riley staked to the
locations of 451 maternal plants included in the original experiment which now
have “inactive” circles with no living seedlings. They visited these maternal
plants because they were not included in demo in 2018 or 2019, and their goal
was to determine the status of every original maternal plant. Since then, a
group of Team Echinacea alums and current members has begun working to prepare
the data for analysis in 2020 with the goal of submitting a manuscript in the
spring.
The first day of searching occurred at East Elk Lake Road, where 13 of the original maternal plants still have living offspring.
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
Data/materials collected: The EchinaceaSeedlings repository holds the data for this experiment. Lea Richardson restructured the repo in December 2019 to facilitate collaboration on the new project.
Notes on the project and master datasheet scans are at ~Dropbox\remData\115_trackSeedlings\slingRefindsFall2019
Data specific to the new 2019 project, including maps and
datasheets used to refind the inactive circle maternal plants, is at ~Dropbox\slingProject2019
Team members involved
with the 2019 project: Lea Richardson, Erin Eichenberger, Riley Thoen,
Drake Mullett, Amy Waananen, Scott Nordstrom, Will Reed, Amy Dykstra, Gretel
Kiefer , Stuart Wagenius
Products: Amy Dykstra used seedling survival data from 2010 and 2011 to model population growth rates as a part of her dissertation.
You can read more about seedling establishment, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
Poor weather conditions delayed demo this year but did not
dampen our spirits! In 2019 Team Echinacea added 4031 visor records to demo and
1431 GPS points to surv. The largest effort this summer occurred at Aanenson
where eight team members took demo records on over 200 flowering plants. We
found flowering plants at Northwest of Landfill with tags from 1995 in situ, meaning the plants were at
least several years older than most of the team. We also found non-angustifolia
Echinacea invading prairie remnants Dog and Yellow Orchid Hill.
The team does demo at everyone’s favorite site: East Riley! Also known as Whose Loc Is It Anyway? Where the status is “Can’t find” and the GPS points don’t matter.
This year we performed demo and surv at 32 prairie remnants
and 10 additional sites with angustifolia populations. For our smaller sites we
visit every mature plant (ones which have flowered before.) At the larger sites
we measure a subsample of the mature population. At every site we also perform
flowering demo, where we visit plants which flowered for the first time or were
not included in the subsample. We record the status of each plant we visit, its
neighbors and the number of heads it produced. All flowering plants are tagged
and shot in surv, and in the coming months we will use demap to reconcile the
2019 demo and surv records with each other as well as those from previous years
to construct our spatial dataset of reproductive fitness in the tallgrass
prairies of our study area.
Total Demo Bill Thom’s Gate, Common Garden, Dog, East of Town Hall, Golf Course, Hegg Lake, Martinson’s Approach, Nessman, North of Golf Course, REL, RHE, RHP, RHS, RHX, RKE, RKW, Randt, Railroad Crossing Douglas County, South of Golf Course, Sign, Town Hall, Tower, Transplant Plot, West of Aanenson, Woody’s, Yellow Orchid Hill
Annual Sample Aanenson, Around Landfill, East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, KJ’s, Krusmark’s , Loeffler’s Corner, Landfill, North of Railroad Crossing, Norwest of Landfill and North of Northwest of Landfill (lumped,) On 27, Riley, Railroad Crossing, Steven’s Approach, Staffanson Prairie
In addition to the annual collection of data, this year Erin
began developing a study to investigate whether flowering return interval and
isolation by distance are correlated in Echinacea.
Start year: 1995
Location: Unbroken (never tilled) remnant prairies in Douglas County, MN, located along roadsides, nature preserves, railroad right-of-ways and privately-owned land.
Data: Access the most recent copies of allDemoDemo.RData and allSurv.RData at ~Dropbox\demapSupplements\demapInputFiles. Demap accepts these files and the demap team will clean and reconcile them in the demap repository. ~Dropbox\geospatialDataBackup2019 houses the raw GPS jobs while the aiisummer2019 repo houses the raw demo records.
Data related to
the flowering isolation study can be found in the floiso repository (contact
Erin Eichenberger for access) and in the folder ~Dropbox\floweringIsolation2019
Products: Amy Dykstra’s dissertation included matrix projection modeling using demographic data
Project “demap” merges phenological, spatial and demographic data for remnant plants
You can read more about the demographic census in the remnants, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
On 21 Dec 2019 demap was updated to accept 2019 demography and survey records. In 2019 we took 4031 visor records in demo and 1413 GPS points in surv. The updated infiles are located in ~Dropbox\demapSupplements\demapInputFiles. Demo and surv have not yet been reconciled.
2019 should be the last year we use a GRS-1 machine, as Chekov is set to be decommissioned this spring. Thanks, Chekov! He was truly a key player while Darwin was in surgery for his busted receiver.
In summer 2019 Team Echinacea continued the aphid addition
and exclusion experiment begun in 2011 by Katherine Muller. The original
experiment included 100 plants selected from experimental plot one to have
aphids added and excluded through multiple years. The intention was to assess
the impact of specialist herbivore Aphis echinaceae on Echinacea fitness.
This year Erin and Shea managed the project. They located 15 living addition plants and 22 exclusion plants. The experiment was conducted from July 8th to August 16th. Erin and Shea performed addition and exclusion twice a week for a total of 10 events, with the final visit consisting only of observation. The number of aphids applied to each plant depended on how many could be obtained and varied between five and 10. They recorded the number of aphids present in classes of 0, 1, 2-10, 11-80 and 80<. They also recorded the precise number of aphids added. Erin and Shea found that natural hair paintbrushes were more effective than synthetic and trimmed the brushes down so fewer than half the hairs remained.
Aphids were gently pushed into petri dishes using paintbrushes
Data collected: Scanned
datasheets are located at ~Dropbox\teamEchinacea2019\aphidAddEx2019\aphidAdEx2019Datasheets.pdf.
The paper sheets are located in the CBG common area filing cabinets in a
manilia folder labeled “Aphid ad/ex 2019,” located next to the 2018 aphid
folder.
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 2019 100 plants were selected for a flowering induction experiment using liquid smoke at site ALF. They were shot with GPS Darwin. Many of these plants lie beyond boundary fence and are not included in demo/surv. However, records containing a “loc” (numbered 1-100) and the number of heads per plant were taken on visors with the demo form and added to the 2019 demo data. The shot points were not added to surv. The experiment was not executed in 2019.
The demo records were added to aiisummer2019 in file ~aiisummer2019\demo\20190726demo.txt.
Job SMOKE_PLANTS_20190726_DARW contains 100 points shot of plants for the experiment. The job is backed up in three locations:
In 2019 Jennifer Ison tracked and sampled ground nesting bees in Exp. Plot 2 with Miyauna Incarnato, Avery Pearson and Ren Johnson from the College of Wooster. Bees were captured, refrigerated, fluorescent dyed, released and tracked to their nests. Several bee nests were located and shot with GPS Darwin. One was excavated and brought back to Wooster for study.
Job BEENESTS_20190730_DARW contains 13 points shot of nests and their surrounding plants. The job is backed up in three locations:
This summer Shea and John continued our yellow pan trap project to sample the pollinator community found along roads in our study area in Minnesota. Today volunteer Mike Humphrey pinned the last bee from this summer’s collection!
Mike with the collection; next he’ll be consolidating these with Shea’s pinning from this summer to be sent off for ID at the University of Minnesota!
Mike received a surprise on his last day of the year; volunteer Char found a desiccated bee in one of the Echinacea heads she was cleaning! Mike reports it’s different from anything else we have in the collection this year, so a seriously cool find.
A majority of the bees in our 2019 collection are unremarkable Lasioglossums that we call “small black bees,” but we also get remarkably shiny blue and green bees in our traps!
Thanks for all your hard work Mike, and we’ll see you next year!
Tate is interning with us in November with his classmates from Lake Forest College. We’re excited to have his help around lab!
Tate, happy to see a scan with barely any chaff! Nice work, cleaners!
Hi FLOG!
I’m Tate Rosenhagen, a junior biology major at Lake Forest College doing a four week mini internship at the Chicago Botanical Garden for a Plant Biology course. It’s my second week in the Echinacea lab, coming in once a week for four hours, and this week I’m learning how to count achenes and randomize samples! Last week I learned a lot of the background of the Echinacea project; what an achene is, how to remove the achenes from the flower head, and a little bit about Echinacea and their pollinators. One of the questions I hope to answer while I’m here is if there is a relationship between seed number and average seed weight in Echinacea. I hypothesized that in heads with fewer seeds, the average seed weight should be higher as all of the plants are in the same experimental plot and thus are subject to the same conditions and nutrients. If the plants have roughly the same amount of nutrients and conditions, theoretically plants should use the same amount of energy as their neighbors. Therefore, I hypothesized that if one plant has created fewer achenes than another plant, their achenes may have more nutrients in their endosperm thus leading to a higher weight. However, a number of factors could cause plants to use their energy in places other than their seeds, such as damage repair on the plant itself or stem growth. I hope that some of the data I find while I’m here will begin to answer this question, however, only being here once a week for four weeks limits how much data I am able to collect.
Jay Fordham gave a presentation on his research about Fraxinus pennsylvanica (green ash) management that he conducted for his summer 2019 REU project. He presented at the 2019 Midstates Undergraduate Research Symposium in St. Louis on November 1-2.
