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We had an excellent first day of the summer field season. We visited prairies, got gear, practiced some observation skills, and learned how to use our datacollectors . Here’s a photo of team-members at the end of the day…  bottom row: Shea, Amy, Erin, John Wes presented the poster “Attaining high species diversity in prairies with low initial restoration investment” at the 85th Winchell Undergraduate Research Symposium & 31st MAS Annual Meeting with Stuart as co-author at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN on 21 April 2018. Here’s the poster. Yay, Wes!  Wes presents his poster. Do you want to germinate some seeds? A while ago Andrea Kramer recommended four resources to find out about seed germination. I’m copying them here: 1. A good place to start with when you are working with a new species: http://www.charlesgwillis.com/baskin-dormancy-database/ This database goes along with the 2014 Baskin seed book, below. It is free but requires sharing your contact info. 2. The book: Baskin, C. and J. Baskin. 2014. Seeds: Ecology, Biogeography, and Evolution of Dormancy and Germination. 2nd ed. Academic Press, New York. 3. The Royal Botanic Garden Kew has a Seed Information Database: http://data.kew.org/sid/ 4. A handy paper with guidelines for a “move-along” experiment: Baskin, C. C., and J. M. Baskin. 2003. When Breaking Seed Dormancy Is a Problem: Try a Move-along Experiment. Native Plants Journal 4:17-21. Bonus: 5. Prairie Moon Nursery has a Cultural Guide that lists germination requirements for hundreds of Midwestern U.S. species. It’s a big excel spreadsheet that you can access from this page…. 6. For germinating Echinacea angustifolia, we use a modified version of the protocol developed by Feghahati & Reese in 1994. We don’t use fungicide, but otherwise stick pretty close to their recommendations. If you use this protocol, please cite this paper. It’s time to prepare annual reports to NSF for our two long-term awards through CBG & through UMN. The period covers 1 April 2017 through 31 March 2018. So, here’s a brief recap of activities from the past 12 months including the summer 2017 field season. Last spring we were busy in the lab. Led by interns Amy & Scott, volunteer citizen scientists at the Chicago Botanic Garden started cleaning heads harvested in summer 2016 to count all of the achenes to generate a detailed and precise dataset of annual plant reproductive fitness. We were way behind because of the huge flowering year in 2015. We worked all fall & winter and we are in good shape now. Led by Tracie, we are cleaning 1148 heads harvested from plots in 2017, which we will finish over this summer. Several undergraduate students have worked on projects in the lab, including Nicolette, Ashley, Marisol, Nina, Trevor, and now Danielle. They are all gaining experience, learning a lot, and contributing to science! Graduate students are hard at work too. Lea has analyzed all of her summer phenology data on Solidago & Liatris. Kristen is working on the bee collection from last summer with Mike. They are both making research plans for summer 2018. Last December, we submitted a paper to Oikos titled “Pollinator-Mediated Mechanisms for Increased Reproductive Success in Early Flowering Plants.” We haven’t heard anything for 101 days & wonder if it has disappeared into a black hole. Our team accomplished a lot in summer 2017! The 2017 summer team, shown below, included three undergraduate students (Ashley, Will & Wes), a high-school student (Anna), two graduate students (Lea & Kristen), and two recent college grads (Tracie & Alex)–not to mention the usual suspects, Gretel, Ruth & Stuart. We summarized progress on many summer projects last fall & made flog posts. Here are links to the updates organized into six groups. First, we measured survival, growth, and flowering effort of our model plant, Echinacea angustifolia, in several experimental plots. The earliest was established in 1996 and the most recent in 2015:
Second, we measure other traits in these plots, including flowering phenology. We also have some treatments, such as pollen addition and aphid addition, which we apply every year. Will has super-cool estimates of the heritability of flowering timing. He is polishing the manuscript and will submit it soon. Amy W. has a manuscript in review that quantifies reproductive synchrony in the 1996 cohort of plants. She estimated how much within-year synchrony (daily phenology) and among-year synchrony (annual flowering) contribute to long-term mating opportunities.
Third, we make observations of Echinacea plants in natural prairie remnants in our study area, including flowering phenology, survival, reproduction, and incidence of disease. Scott is investigating effects of fire on population growth rates in our remnants using a life-table response experiment approach. While she is on sabbatical, Amy D. is analyzing the seedling establishment dataset.
Fourth, we study plant species other than Echinacea angustifolia and we are very interested in pollinators, including native solitary bees.
Fifth, two REU participants worked on our Team last summer. Here are updates of their projects. Sixth, we are worried about non-native Echinacea plants that are used in restorations and how they impact populations of the native Echinacea angustifolia. We have several ongoing experiments that investigate a population of Echinacea pallida introduced within our study area.
 The Team from summer 2017 Here are the books I recommended in today’s professional development seminar on Science Communication for the PBC graduate program. Best wishes in your endeavors to communicate more effectively! Everyone benefits when you communicate better, especially you. Carol S. Dweck. 2006. Mindset : the new psychology of success. Random House. Daniel Kahneman. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stephen B. Heard. 2016. The Scientist’s Guide to Writing. Princeton U Press. Heath & Heath. 2007. Made to Stick. Random House. Randy Olson. 2015. Houston, we have a narrative: why science needs a story. University of Chicago Press. Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool. 2016. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Houghton Mifflin. I also mentioned SMART goals. Wikipedia reveals all you need to know. In a previous flog post, I recommended several books about managing your time. Winter blues got you down? Watch some bees pollinating Echinacea plants! Echinacea Project Videos on YouTubeAhh, summer! We have lots of footage from experiments where we observed native solitary bees visiting Echinacea heads. Note: these bees aren’t visiting to pollinate. They are collecting pollen to eat or to feed to their babies. Enjoy! Congratulations to Lea Richardson. She was just appointed a Dr. John N. Nicholson Fellow at Northwestern University for the 2018-2019 academic year! Over the next several weeks we are going to post updates on all the projects we worked on during summer 2017. Whew we did a lot–it might take a couple of months!  Team Echinacea summer 2017 Put a bookmark on our update page to stay caught up. We’ll post all updates on that page. Two new projects to look out for are Richardson’s “Liatris and Solidago phenology” and “Pollinators on roadsides.” Also, we’ll recap Barto’s & Braker’s REU projects. Stay tuned! We didn’t work on the project Fire & flowering at Staffanson Prairie Preserve Today was Scott Nordstrom’s last day working at the Chicago Botanic Garden with the Echinacea Project. Scott completed a 13-month internship, during which he worked in the field in Minnesota, assessed lifetime fitness of Stipa plants in our common garden experiment, improved a workflow for taking x-ray images of Echinacea fruits, contributed to analysis and management of numerous long-term experiments, supervised citizen scientists in the lab, and made many other valuable contributions. It was great to have him on the team. This fall, Scott starts a PhD program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Best wishes, Scott!
Today was Amy Waananen’s last day working at the Chicago Botanic Garden with the Echinacea Project. The last few days were a flurry of activity with our potluck, preparing for prescribed burning in Minnesota, and getting ready for the summer field season. On top of that, Amy submitted a manuscript about reproductive synchrony to The American Naturalist. It’s sad to see Amy leave but we’re happy that she will be nearby. She is working out on the prairie in western Minnesota the summer with her new lab group. It is great she is starting a PhD program at the University of Minnesota this fall. Good luck, Amy!  Amy W at CBG |
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