22% done, another effort made this morning with 4 pairs!
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Yesterday, the team began measuring our biggest common garden experiment, P1! This plot has 10,992 positions that were planted with Echinacea. Yesterday, 3 teams of pairs went out for about 3.5 hours in the morning and knocked out 1,140 positions and 14 segments for over 10% of P1! I’m excited we made so much progress the first day! Below is map that visualizes progress. Stay tuned for today’s update.  I was lucky to be partnered with Blaire for this flagging quest and we were an unstoppable duo. Each meter transect is marked with a nail, and between the the two of us, we had a high success rate for nail unearthing. Oftentimes they were parallel with the ground or hidden by nail-like imposters (rocks) that we suspect Stuart may have planted to test our nail-finding abilities. Blaire dubbed us as “private eyes” and I said we were “human metal detectors”. If you’d like to hire us for your investigation needs, you can contact us through the flog.  Welcome back to this week’s episode of “What’s Flowering at Staffanson?”, where I will report to our avid flog followers the current blooms at one of our most beloved remnant prairies. Pasqueflower (Anemone patens) is still flowering in some parts of the preserve, but most of the plants are producing fruits by now.   Next up we found some prairie buttercup (Ranunculus rhomboideus)  Jared wanted me to get a photo of Carex media, but like the photo above, my phone camera wouldn’t focus on the slender sedge (I tried, I swear!). So, picture everyone’s favorite sedge ~here~. Meanwhile, I can show you a non-blurry photo of violet wood sorrel (Oxalis violacea).  We saw a handful of heart-leaved Alexanders (Zizia aptera) beginning to produce their yellow umbels (or umbellets?).  For some hemi-parasitic representation, we saw bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata). Actually, we saw loads of Comandra, it seemed to cover large portions of Staffanson!  Hoary puccoon (Lithospermum canescens) was just beginning to show its Kraft mac-and-cheese-like colors.  Perhaps my favorite photo of the day was of prairie violet (Viola pedatifida) and its dark purple striped veins. If you look closely, you can see Jared admiring the landscape in the background. Or is it Jared…?  The true mystery of the day was the usually-abundant prairie smoke (Geum triflorum). We ventured all the way to the west end of Staffanson before we found a plant. While I appreciated the treasure hunt, I wonder why it’s a poor year for prairie smoke!  I made all of these observations of Friday, May 19th. I’m excited to return to Staffanson in a few weeks and see how the prairie has changed! Echinacea Project 2023 Biology & Geography/GIS major, Gustavus Adolphus College ’22 Pronouns: she/her Research Interests My research interests include plant-insect interactions, the effects of fire on plant reproduction, flowering phenology and generally how human disturbance impacts prairie species. Currently, I am working on an experiment with Alex which investigates the effects of smoke on Echinacea flowering. I’m excited to gain more skills this summer in mentoring, data management and analysis, techniques like hand-crossing, and leading field crews! Statement I am from Minneapolis, MN and spent my college years in the great city of St. Peter, MN. I have been working with the Echinacea Project since last June as a research intern. In my spare time I like to read lots of books, run long distances, play board games, embark on various crafting projects, listen to concerning amounts of Taylor Swift music, and spend as much time outside as I can.  The lab was buzzing today as we bee-stowed Mike, one of our loyal volunteers, with an official Achene County of Echinacea Empire Passport! This celebration marks Mike’s return from Bee Land, where he has been residing since this past September.  For the past many months, Mike has been working tirelessly on pinning our bee specimens for the Yellow Pan Trap project. This project tracks the changes over 20 years in bee abundance and species composition along roadsides in western Minnesota. You can read more updates on the Yellow Pan Trap project here!   Mike has been working on the samples we collected during the 2022 field season, and just a few weeks ago he finished pinning 789 bees! I can’t bee-lieve how many specimens that is!  The pinning project required steady hands, an attention to detail and the extensive knowledge of bee identification; all characteristics that Mike has! He spent many hours with the microscope sifting through vials of insects.  No Achene County celebration is complete without, you guessed it, a sweet treat! The most famous baker in all the land, Alex, crafted a beautiful honey cake drizzled with chocolate and surrounded by pear slices. The ornamental bees on the top of the cake are made up pears (for the body) and dark chocolate shards (for the wings).  We are so excited that Mike is no longer a solitary worker bee! We are also excited to send all of Mike’s specimens over to Zach at the University of Minnesota for identification.  If you get the chance, please welcome back Mike to the Echinacea hive! Two large packages arrived on the doorstep of the Chicago Botanic Garden this week containing 40 (yes, 40!) brand new emergence traps! This summer, we are conducting research on the impacts of prescribed fire and fragmented patch size on ground-nesting bees. This new research is funded by ENRTF! To make sure the emergence traps were functional, Alex and I decided to assemble one in the lab. The assembly was fairly easy, but we noticed that there were some plastic pieces that connected two fiberglass rods that may fall off or get lost easily; sounds like a job for some super glue! We also realized we will need to purchase a heavy object, like a chain, to lay around the base of the emergence trap to prevent it from flying away in the wind!   Last week, the Chicago Botanic Garden ended their annual orchid show and opened up all their plants for purchase to garden members and employees! Alex and I ventured to the sale at 10 am last Thursday to find a long, looping line that weaved throughout the Regenstein center. We waited about 25 minutes to reach the beginning of the line. We were not prepared for the carnage we were about to witness. Elbows were flying, emotions were high, plants were abundant. There was a good deal on tiny Phalaenopsis, 2 for $10. At one point, a man tried to purloin Alex’s beautiful orchid while she went to return a shopping basket, and I had to protect the plant from danger. Alex described the ordeal as “a mad house” and “chaos”, and I definitely agree with that assessment.  Nobody tell Jared, but I walked (or, more like ran) out of there with 7 orchids (some to give to family and friends, and one or two for myself). Alex ended up with 3 stunning orchids as well! The line to check out was slightly calmer, though equally as long as the line to enter the sale. Many people were becoming agitated, having to wait in line and carry their heavy load of orchids. Alex noticed that each cash register had a number (as you can see in the photo below) and each number was a different font! How silly!  For anyone wanting to brave the orchid sale in future years, my only advice is to prepare for battle. Things are movin’ and groovin’ in the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden! Now that we’ve wrapped up remnant Echinacea, it’s time to reenter common garden territory. Ah, sweet sweet common garden, where all plants exist neatly* on a grid unlike the unruly remnants. One of the main things we’ve been tackling is cleaning the 2022 common garden heads. There are 2,116 heads to be cleaned and we’ve already cleaned 561 (or ~27%) of them! Wow, amazing progress! The only remaining and 3 additional bags from 2020. Once those are done, we’re caught up from the backlog that COVID augmented. As for other steps in the ACE process…  After cleaning comes rechecking, and we’ve had students working on rechecking Echinacea heads from experimental plot 1 in 2019 and 2020. Once these have been rechecked, we’ve got scan-master volunteer Marty prepare our achenes for uploading to the ACE website! Our volunteers have also been catching us up on counting from 2017 through 2019 to get data ready for Wyatt’s masters thesis! I won’t spoil what she’s investigating, but just know it’s a burning question that I’m stoked about! Alex and I have also been attempting to clean up the Cheerios boxes that line our lab window. These boxes contain achenes from the past 20 years and many different experiments, all at different stages of the ACE process. Volunteers have started assembling some of the achenes into x-ray sheets for the years 2017 and 2018. We also had Priti help us inventory boxes from 2016. We took seeds out of these boxes for our seed addition experiment, but were unsure what achenes actually remained. These seeds did not germinate, so we will put them in storage. However, we have other seeds that are still viable, so we are hoping to freeze them and put them in the seed bank here at CBG!  We’re hoping to keep moving forward this spring with all steps of the ACE process, and create an efficient system for taking data off the ACE counting and classifying website! *it would be neatly if it weren’t for those meddling rogue plants! On the final Tuesday of March, the Echinacea Project honored our most recent inductee to the Achene County royal court. One of our loyal volunteers, Char Schweingruber, was crowned the Empress of Echinacea! This is a prestigious title reserved for a citizen who has demonstrated a longtime dedication to the lab, a mastery of cleaning Echinacea heads and a passion for conservation and restoration.   Char has been a volunteer at CBG since 1993. She began much of her volunteer career outdoors doing restoration work in the natural areas of the garden, especially in our beloved prairie ecosystem! She has been involved in the Echinacea Project since its inception when Stuart began at the garden in 2001. She joined a small group of volunteers that spearheaded our ACE protocol where Echinacea seeds are cleaned, counted and assessed for pollination rates. These days, Char is an expert at cleaning Echinacea heads and is essential in keeping our lab process moving. We appreciate our volunteers, like Char, who dedicate their time to the Echinacea Project!  The ceremony involved a speech from Stuart, the conferring of the royal sash, and a delicious strawberry layer cake baked fresh by Alex! As Tuesdays are the day where we have the most volunteers in the lab, it was great to celebrate all of Char’s hard work with a large group of volunteers and CBG staff members.  If you see Char walking in the halls of the Plant Science building, don’t forget to congratulate her on her new title (and maybe give a proper bow or curtsy, if you feel inclined)! |
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