Today was an exciting day at Town Hall! This evening, we got to welcome the wonderful Ren, Miyauna, and Avery from Ohio’s College of Wooster, headquarters of Echinacea East. We’re all so excited to show our new fieldmates around the sites on their first day tomorrow, especially considering they got here just in time to see the gangbuster flowering in Experimental Plot 2!
Welcome to Town Hall!
While we waited for our new fieldmates to arrive, the Minnesota team was fairly busy. Jay and Riley returned from their trip to Gustavus Adolphus, and Amy drove back up from the Twin Cities. Drake had a particularly productive Sunday, gathering hundreds of Comandra seeds from around Hegg Lake in preparation for some exciting experiments examining prairie parasitism.
That’s a lot of seeds in a lot of coin envelopes…
And for those who were following our puzzling progress, I am pleased to announce that the 1000-piece prairie puzzle has officially been completed!
We started off our sunny day in the field by breaking off into two groups: the demo team (starring Michael and Erin) and the planting team (comprising Jay, Shea, Riley, Drake, and myself). Today, we were peppering P1 with Asclepias viridiflora that were grown from seed at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Here’s Shea and Jay returning after putting our last few seedlings in the ground:
After lunch, Jay and I went back into the plot to check on the plants for the Pollen Limitation Experiment. We were hoping to count how many had developed flowering stalks… but strangely enough, none of the plants in the Pollen Limitation Experiment were flowering! No florets left to limit pollen access to, but even no data is still data. And while we were checking the plants in P1, Jay and I had lots of opportunities to make some field friends! From damselflies and monarchs to spittlebugs and cocoons, we had plenty of company as we counted our Echinacea.
Echinacea angustifolia has an amazing will to survive, even on the edge of a fairly inhospitable habitat with relatively poor soil quality. The ground at our East Riley Site is pocked with ruts, packed by frequent mowing, and nearly scraped clean by this winter’s snow plowing. As an Echinacea Project veteran and a local familiar with this roadside plot, John told me on the drive to East Riley that he was nervous we might not see any plants sprouting out of the squished soil. But luckily, we were welcomed to the site by several healthy plants and rising flower buds poking out of the packed and duff-less ground. Surprisingly resilient, native Echinacea still sprout from their deep roots at the East Riley roadside season after season, striving to flower and pass on their genes to the next generation.
Life on the roadside at East Riley may be tough for the plants, but the tent caterpillars seem to be thriving. Here’s John examining one of their characteristic webby nests on a tree that must have been their most recent, hearty meal.
I am interested in community ecology, conservation genetics, and interspecific interaction, particularly in the context of pollination and reproduction. This winter, I had the wonderful opportunity to collect and analyze seed set data for Echinacea angustifolia, Solidago speciosa, and Liatris aspera with Team Echinacea. During that time, I came to wonder how the controlled burns used to maintain prairie fragments might influence plants’ interactions with their pollinators, potentially by altering the characteristics of plants’ floral displays in the year after the burn. This summer, I hope to explore other factors that could influence plant-pollinator interactions in prairie fragments.
Statement
I grew up in Menlo Park, California. In addition to studying biology as my major, I am a Cognitive Science minor with a focus on linguistics and neurobiology. I also enjoy learning languages, and while I’ve formally studied French, Spanish, and a little bit of Japanese, recently I’ve been trying my hand at teaching myself Korean. Outside of the classroom, I love to cook, knit, crochet, embroider, play clarinet, meditate with tai chi, and practice Muggle quidditch.
This has been an exciting last week for the Carleton externs in the Echinacea lab! We had the incredible opportunity to not only analyze our collected data in R, but also to develop posters about our findings and present our results to the resident members of Team Echinacea. Tris’s project examined the effects of pollen limitation on future growth, survival, and fitness in Echinacea. Check out Tris’s flog entry for more! Meanwhile, Sarah and I determined that previous prairie burning and plant characteristics like flower head count may interact to differentially affect reproductive success in some Asteraceae. See Sarah’s post for the details!
It has been a pleasure working with the Echinacea Project over the past three weeks, and though this is our last day in the lab, I am excited to bring all that I have learned here with me into the future. Working up-close and personal with specimens as we carried them through data collection, analysis, and the presentation of results was a gratifying experience that introduced me to some of the joy of science. Thank you to Dr. Stuart Wagenius, Lea Richardson, and Michael LaScaleia for your mentorship and guidance! It was a pleasure to be a part of Team Echinacea.
With half of our externship now past, some exciting things are happening in the lab! Yesterday, Sarah, Tris, and I had the opportunity to talk with Stuart, Michael, and Lea about some of the research questions and hypotheses we’ve started to form while working so closely with the specimens over the past week and a half. Stuart offered several suggestions about how to formulate these questions so that they are testable with the kinds of data we have, while also advising us about the statistical approaches we could take to assess our hypotheses. As we gather together the last crucial pieces of data, we’ll have the opportunity to try answering some of these questions. If all goes well, we will be rounding out our experience working with Team Echinacea by the end of next week with our own independent projects and analyses of the data.
In the meantime, we have been continuing our final steps of data collection. Despite our earlier trials and tribulations holding our breath while individually counting hundreds of seeds the size of sand grains, our new Solidago counting procedure seems to be a success! With a more efficient system in place, we hope to finish counting seeds by the start of next week. All that remains after that is x-raying and classifying the x-rays from all of our samples of Echinacea, Liatris, and Solidago before we can gather together all of our data into frames. As we learn more and more from our mentors about how to manipulate data sets in RStudio, I can’t wait to start assessing regressions and comparing models soon!
Excited for the number crunching,
Julie
Tris and Sarah demonstrating our new and improved Solidago counting procedure
My name is Julie Bailard, and I am a junior biology major and cognitive science minor from Carleton College. I am working with Stuart Wagenius and Michael LaScaleia on their project examining the effects of pollen limitation on Echinacea angustifolia‘s survival and reproductive success. I have also been collecting data for Lea Richardson’s research determining whether the Echinacea Project’s findings apply to other flowering prairie plants with similar methods of seed formation. Over the course of my first week in the lab, I have been cleaning, counting, and randomizing samples of achenes from Echinacea and Liatris aspera. As an aspiring population ecologist, I am thoroughly enjoying this opportunity to work with specimens up close and to follow these achenes from the flower head to the data sheet. I can’t wait to start analyzing the data soon!
Outside of the lab, I enjoy reading, knitting, playing quidditch, and practicing clarinet.
