Here’s a list of plant species that flowered within 2m of a flowering Echinacea plant that we observed last year. The list is sorted by the count of inflorescences we counted. Species in the Asteraceae are highlighted.
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We’re off to a great start this season. We’ve made good progress on our ongoing projects and folks are well on their way with their independent projects. We had better keep moving because the earliest plant in the Common Garden started flowering on the 21st! Here’s a list of independent projects for Summer 2010:
I attached a pdf file of our ongoing projects. Here’s a list of plants that are available for Katie to use in inb1: Echinacea plants on our transect at Staffanson Preserve are done shedding pollen for the year. A few still have persistent, receptive styles, but August 18th was the last day pollen was shed. This graph show how many heads (left panels) or plants (right panels) finished on each day. The earliest heads finished on 15 July. I divided the preserve according to the burn unit: burned East (top panels) and unburned West (bottom panels):
Final date of flowering for 393 heads on 161 Echinacea plants
from a burned and unburned unit of a prairie preserve This graph is based on preliminary, raw data, but I wanted to share. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of the graph. Here’s a histogram of pollen sizes (~30 grains per species) from 3 individual plants of Coreopsis palmata, Echinacea angustifolia, and Heliopsis helianthoides.
Greg outlined the methods taking the measurements here. Greg, what software program did you use? I found a few things besides Echinacea plants, while searching for plants that may have died in the common garden. I found a fossil shell. I gave it to Per and he held on to it for a while but dropped it. Someone else will find it! I found a stylus (for a handspring visor). It’s probably Gretel’s; she lost hers earlier this year. I found a snake skin with an intact top of head–the eyes were transparent-cool! Per gave to Hattie, I think. I found a mouse in a mouse nest (right on top of dead Echinacea leaves from last year). The mouse bounded away. Also, Ruth called while I was searching to say that she had just found the serial cord for the survey station data collector that we couldn’t find–we had been looking for that for a few days. Wahoo! Finally, I emptied my pockets of litter that I had picked up: three pieces of flagging, one melted plastic plug label, and 2 blue plastic cocktail stirrers.
Stuff from Stuart’s pocket: stylus (1), flagging bits (3),
melted plastic plug label (1), blue plastic cocktail stirrers (2) We are making great progress on annual measurements of plant in the common garden. On Monday we finished measuring all plants (~10000). On Tuesday we finished placing staples at all locations where plants died overwinter in 2007-2008 (>700). Today we made a huge dent in “rechecks.” Rechecking is when we revisit all the locations where we recorded a “can’t find” and left a flag while measuring. We placed about 1500 flags. About 700 of those “can’t finds” were stapled this year. So, we just verified that staples were in the correct locations and pulled flags. Some locations had staples from previous years that a measurer didn’t find. We pulled flags there too. Then there were the plants that were alive last year. We rechecked those and found quite a few plants. Each time someone found one, they yelled “wahoo” and the rest of us responded with a whoop and a holler. Shucks, it was fun!! Actually I was burned out by the end. Next year we should plan two 2h sessions instead of one 4h session. A list of equipment we need for demo was posted here: https://echinaceaproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/demography.html Here’s a snippet of R code showing how to extract info from the shrivel character data (a file is below… df <- data.frame(shrivel.txt =c("x", "xoxx", "xxxx", "oooo", "xoooo"))
df # start off with this data frame
str(df)
df$shrivel.count <- nchar(as.character(df$shrivel.txt)) #add column
vx <- gsub("o", "", df$shrivel.txt) # replace o with ""
vx
df$shrivel.xs <- nchar(vx) # make a new column in df
vo <- gsub("x", "", df$shrivel.txt) # replace x with ""
vo
df$shrivel.os <- nchar(vo) # make a new column in df
str(df)
df # final data frame
In response to Caroline’s request for more locations to plant Stipa in the common garden, I have selected 208 new locations at random. This map shows the new locations in green. (Blue dots are the previously selected locations.) Here’s a file listing all 208 location. It’s suitable for making 208 labels for 208 seeds! stipaSeedLabels2.csv |
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