|
||||
|
Hi folks! Here’s the protocol for measuring plants in the common garden this year. The protocol hasn’t changed much from last year, but the description has improved; the protocol is now a html file and there are many nice images from 2007. Thanks to Jameson and Gretel for taking the photos. And thanks to the wonders of digital photography, Pendragon forms, the UMN library’s blog, and contributors to this flog. Wahoo! Let the counting of leaves, ants, and aphids begin!
We are very interesting in observing (and participating in) the Echinacea mating season this summer. We are still waiting for the action to begin. Here is a map of the flowering plants in the main garden. Each dot represents a plant with 1 or more buds (immature capitula). The short purple bar indicates a plant with one bud, a long bar indicates two, and n short bars indicates n buds. In the main garden we found 869 plants with at least one bud and a total of 1572 buds. The most buds on a plant is 11. This is a modified “sunflower plot” that was generated with R.
We are waiting for the action to begin. At this time last year, like most years, Echinacea flowering was in full swing. We are prepared for the flowering to begin. We flagged all positions evenly divisible by 5. We mowed paths between rows so we can avoid stepping on plants. We have flagged every flowering plant. Note: don’t buy fluorescent colored pin flags. The flags tend to detach from the more frequently than non-fluorescent colors. What’s up, Forestry Suppliers? We weeded thistles and sweet clover, trapped gophers, found plants with Aster yellows, and are waiting for the action to begin. This flog entry from last year proved valuable. I just looked it up and followed the common garden maintenance protocol.
This photo by Christine shows fours seedlings near Echinacea plant 2044 at StApp on 17 June 2008. The seedlings are mapped & uniquely identified on pages 56 & 56 of “Seedling search 2008.” The ruler is marked with 16th of inches on the top and millimeters on the bottom. Today we finished searching for seedlings for the season. We searched near about 200 plants that flowered last year in 15 sites. We found about 239 seedlings. We made maps so that we can refind all the seedlings in August–at least those that survive. In August we will make sure we can find the seedlings again next year so we will be able to follow this cohort for several years to determine their survival, growth, and eventual reproduction. Searching for seedling is fun, but we are ready to move on to other exciting developments!
Here’s a photo of the crew from the first day of the summer (Julie, Christine, Megan, Ben, Lecia & Gretel). Echinacea hasn’t started flowering in our Common Garden yet, but it will soon. We are ready! Reinforcements from Illinois will start work tomorrow. We’ve been working for two weeks now and we have accomplished a lot already: It’s hard to believe how much we’ve done already (and how few flog entries I’ve posted). Here’s a list of ideas for independent or group projects that we discussed today. 1. Improve procedure for mapping seedlings in remnants. 2. Investigate new aphid biology: distribution, behavior, ant associates, et cetera. 3. Investigate biology and behavior of native bees: 4. Do “Time lapse” photography of Echinacea heads to visualize floral development. 5. Pollen collection from plants to develop identification key (with pollen collection from bees to assess generalization/specialization. 6. Quantify plant species richness in remnants, experimental plots, local preserves. 7. Map distribution of Echinacea‘s co flowering species (Thistles, sweet clover, Coreopsis) 8. Collect seed of Stipa spartea or Dalea purpurea for common garden study. 9. There are many more possibilities… Here’s a quick tally of the demography data that we took in the natural remnants this summer. I think we did a lot! We took a total of 5027 records. Here they are broken down by loc status…
This is just the first rough pass through the dataset. There is a lot of clean-up to do and mysteries to figure out. For example, of the 81 “good loc, diff tag no” records, 12 have no loc and 1 has no tag (gulp). Flowering rates seemed to be high this year. 1700 records list one or more normal flowering heads and another 223 records had only non-normal heads. There were some big plants too: two plants had 11 flowering heads and two had ten! The greatest number of rosettes was 47 (that’s good ol’ plant #1540 at NGC.) We counted 9276 total rosettes. The summer field season is done for me. We drove back to Illinois on Saturday. I’ll try to post reviews of the datasets occasionally and maybe some photos too. Jennifer is the only one still in the field. She is harvesting seedheads today & tomorrow, then returning to IL. Today was the last day of a great field season. We finished the the demography census of flowering plants. We surveyed all sites that needed it. We refound the last of the seedlings that we mapped this spring. And we organized our gear and put it away. Here’s a photo of Ian, Rachel, and Amy sorting flags… The heavy equipment in the photo was used to fill in the 2m deep trench that ran through the yard and driveway for the past few days. In the past few weeks, moving the new “storage shed”/office and the associated construction and landscaping has introduced additional chaos into our fun-filled field activities! I’m heading back to IL tomorrow (oops, Saturday is already today). I’ll keep you posted with summaries of datasets as they come out and I hope to add some more photos to the flog. It’s been a great summer. Thanks to everyone for all your great work! Here’s a map (pdf format) of plants in the common garden. A purple asterisk indicates a plant that flowered this year. The size of the asterisk is proportional to the number of heads produced. Download file We harvested a lot of heads today & yesterday. It’s early for us to be harvesting. |
  |
|||
|
© 2024 The Echinacea Project - All Rights Reserved - Log in Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||
