Stuart Wagenius « The Echinacea Project

Plants measured in the PHEN plot at Hegg Lake

We finished measuring plants in Jennifer’s Phenology plot at Hegg Lake WMA this Friday.

We measured many plants.

We measured about 2700 plants. Eight plants flowered this year. We visited another 1300 locations where we couldn’t find a plant (mostly because they had died). Here’s a map of the plot with the status of each location (click to see a bigger version)…

In addition to Echinacea angustifolia, we saw some good prairie plants in the plot, including lead plant (Amorpha canescens), yellow lady-slipper (Cypripedium calceolus), prairie rose (Rosa arkansana), Missouri goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis), silver leaf scurf pea (Psoralea argophylla), and many others.

It was a big job, but we were quite efficient. We laid out 50m tapes on every other row to help guide us. Four of us went out on Wednesday to flag positions 1 and 50 for all rows. That took ~2h. We started flagging positions 10, 20, but that was unnecessary. On Thursday we all went out and measured from 2-4 pm. On Friday we did two shifts: 10 -12 and 2:30 -5.

We were happy to be done.

On the way out we removed a weed that we had noticed the day before–spotted knapweed. We were careful not to touch it because it can be a skin irritant. I’d never seen this plant in the study area before.

Heading home.

What a great way to end the week. It was Katie and Laura’s last day. They are heading back to the Chicago Botanic Garden to prepare their posters and talks.

measure plants in the PHEN plot at Hegg Lake

This afternoon we are going to measure plants in Jennifer’s Phenology plot at Hegg Lake WMA. Here is a script that makes a datasheet that assigns us rows to measure. The order is approximately 1 – 80, but they are slightly mixed up (just to keep us on our toes): measurePHENatHeggLakeRows.r

burning permit info

This site explains the circumstances where burning permits are required in Minnesota:

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/forestry/fire/questions.html

String trimmer

The string segments that came with the wheeled trimmer were 47 cm long. I used 32 cm sections for trimming rows in the CG.

fl pla in CG

Four plants are flowering in Andrea’s garden this year. Andrea Southgate planted this experiment (aka inb2) in 2006 as part of her Master’s research project. Andrea and Jennifer made a photo essay about their plantings that year. These are the first plants to flower in this experiment–about 4/1500 in their fifth growing season!