Nina here! Today, Trevor and I continued analyzing the data that we collected during the first two weeks of our externship. We both kept working in R, perfecting our papers, and analyzing our results.

Trevor found the confidence intervals for mean seed-set for Liatris and was very excited to see that the two intervals didn’t overlap, strengthening his confidence in his previous findings. Next, he aggregated and merged Solidago data before repeating the analysis he did for Liatris on the Solidago data, but with very different results. It seems as if Solidago was not effected by the burn that occurred in the site (as you can see from the photo on the left), but stay tuned for more updates!

Meanwhile, I looked the diversity function within R’s ‘vegan’ package to use Shannon’s and Simpson’s Diversity Indices on my plant community from each plot. I plotted seed-set, fecundity, and achene count against each index and found the highest correlation when looking at achene count. Next, I calculated species richness as well as the Shannon’s and Simpson’s Diversity Indices including only flowering plants. More updates to follow! After finishing up my actual analysis, I got back to working on my paper (which you can see a preview of on the right) and started thinking about which portions of my results and which graphs I might want to include in my paper.

Nina here! Today, Trevor and I downloaded R and RStudio and started familiarizing ourselves with R by using the tutorial package ‘swirl’ and completing several of the lessons about the basic building blocks, vectors, matrices, data frames, logic, functions, and much more! Thanks in part to Trevor’s donut holes and Tracy and Lea’s support, we powered through and completed the swirl tutorials. Next, I got started with looking at my own data by reading in some of the csv data files into R and trying to get started on viewing them and writing a script to determine species richness. Also, just for fun, here’s a counting timelapse from a couple days ago of an evaluating empty, partially empty, and full achenes!

Nina here! Today, Trevor continued cleaning his Solidago heads, which have very small and delicate achenes. However, because his achenes are so small and fluffy, they tend to fly everywhere, including onto the bread that Trevor was eating! He cleaned 28 heads today, which was very impressive. Meanwhile, I finished re-checking my Echinacea heads for any stray achenes that were stubbornly clinging to the heads and proceeded to scanning the achenes for counting. While I was re-checking, I found quite a few miscellaneous bees and spiders, some of which are pictured below. Also, a picture of one of my scans below – for this site, the achenes needed to be separated according the the location that they came from on the head, so ‘top,’ ‘mid,’ ‘bot,’ and ‘other’ achenes were segregated. Next week, I hope to start randomizing my samples for X-raying and counting the scans that I took. Trevor hopes to finish counting and move on to X-raying next week as well.

We also had a lab meeting today to discuss a draft of a paper on Echinacea pollination, specifically analyzing the number of pollinators over the course of the season as well as type of pollinator and quality of pollination. The paper had some interesting (and confusing!) results, so it was nice to discuss the draft with others from the lab and look at the feedback that the draft received from reviewers.

Hello, my name is Nina Denne and I am currently a freshman at Carleton College. I will be working as an extern at the Chicago Botanic Garden for the next 3 weeks, specifically looking at the relationship between reproductive fitness of Echinacea and the diversity of the surrounding habitat. For now, I’m mostly cleaning Echinacea heads and then I will be counting the achenes and X-raying achenes to determine whether they are viable. I’m very excited to be back at the Botanic Garden after having conducted a germination experiment with two species of Echinacea in high school.