|
|
On this day inaugural National Citizen Scientists’ Day, we acknowledge the hard-work and dedication of our team of Citizen Scientists in the Echinacea Project’s lab the Chicago Botanic Garden. Some of the citizen scientist members of our Team have been working on the project almost 15 years!
Read profiles of our fabulous citizen scientist Team members:
Aldo — — Anne — — — Art — — — Bill
Bob — — Char — — — Kathryn — — Laura
Leslie — — Lois — — — Lou — — — Marty
Naomi — — Shelley — — Suzanne — — Susan
Two humble volunteers declined to have profiles posted. We respect their privacy.
Read about some of the ways in which they contribute.
Read about what some of the activities from this past week.
Read many flog posts about our volunteer citizen scientists as written by members of Team Echinacea.
Taylor presented a poster of her summer research on fitness of native, non-native, and hybrid Echinacea plants at the Tennessee Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Conference. The meeting was held February 25-26, 2016 at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Taylor was awarded 3rd place in Science Poster Presentation category. Yay, Taylor!
Katherine Muller’s paper “Echinacea angustifolia and its specialist ant-tended aphid: a multi-year study of manipulated and naturally-occurring aphid infestation” was selected by the Editors at Ecological Entomology as the most interesting paper in the current issue (41:1). This means that her paper will be highlighted on the Journal’s website and made Open Access for the next two months, along with a summary of the paper and an image of the ants attending the aphids.
Congratulations, Katherine! This paper was based on Katherine’s MS thesis in the Plant Biology and Conservation graduate program at Northwestern University. Katherine is now in a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota.
Here’s the text that is on the Journal’s main page …
Aphid abundance was manipulated on the perennial coneflower Echinacea angustifolia, which hosts a specialist aphid (Aphis echinaceae) tended by ants. Both have undergone extensive habitat loss and fragmentation. Aphids did not harm host performance after two years, though they did accelerate seasonal senescence. This experiment found a negative association between aphids and other herbivore damage, suggesting ant protection. However, observations showed the opposite trend, with larger plants more likely to have aphid infestation and leaf damage. The results suggest plant size drives foliar herbivory more than aphid infestation.
The paper was co-authored by Stuart Wagenius, Katherine’s MS adviser.
 Here are some of those cute little aphids!  This collection plant had some of the most aphids we’ve seen yet in one place!  Specialist aphids, Aphis echinaceae, on a head of Echinacea angustifolia  Ants tending Aphis echinaceae
The air temperature in Hoffman, MN this weekend got down to -20°F (-29°C). The Echinacea roots are surely a little bit warmer. Here are a few photos to help remember the warmth of last summer and get us thinking about the spring.
-
-
Happiness!
-
-
-
Rare sight! This plant hasn’t begun flowering yet!
-
-
-
Happiness!
-
-
The delicious food cooked by various members of the team
-
-
-
Happy to be finished with a full day of work!
-
-
Done flagging the hybrid plot!
-
-
Amy is excited to bag heads at landfill!
-
-
-
Danny’s bouquet
-
-
One of our Halictid friends visits a flower. I see style shriveling in this plants future
-
-
A cozy home for a bold caterpillar
-
-
Small ray florets at Riley. straight surrounding the purple center of the head.
-
-
Team Echinacea 2015: Danny, Matt, Ben, Will, Gina, Taylor, Lea, Amy, Katherine, Ali, Abby
-
-
Using GPS to stake Echinacea plants!
-
Read Ben’s Lee’s report and look at his map about pollinator habitat in Echinacea land.
Here’s the poster that Jackie and Audrey made in their GIS class.
Read this article about prairie conservation from the Glencoe newspaper.
The summer field season is off to a great start! We have assembled an excellent team to investigate ecology and evolution in fragmented prairie habitat focusing on the narrow-leaved purple coneflower as a model organism. Meet members of the team.
 Team Echinacea 2015: Danny, Matt, Ben, Will, Gina, Taylor, Lea, Amy, Katherine, Alison, Abby
We started the season with tours of local prairies large and small, including Staffanson Prairie Preserve, Hegg Lake WMA, which are large and protected. Stay tuned for team-members’ first impressions of some of the nearby remnant Echinacea populations.
Team-members hail from near & far: Barrett, Elbow Lake, and Alexandria, Minnesota & California, Alabama, New York, and Rhode Island. They are excited to develop summer projects and they will post their proposals here next week. Our team includes four college students, four who just graduated college, two high school teachers, and one high school student. And there are the old-timers.
To get ready for field work, we took the Hjelm House out of winter storage and cleaned out our storage facilities (g3). We inventoried supplies and made signs and tags for fieldwork. Everyone got a pouch with tools and supplies and Gretel has assigned us all a data collector. This may be (should be) the last year for our trusty handspring visor data collectors. The visors are trustworthy, but the computers and software that run them are showing their age.
The first main activity of the season was assessing survival and growth of 2526 plants in the Q2 experiment, which is designed to quantify the additive genetic variation in two Echinacea populations. The amount of additive genetic variation determines a population’s capacity for adaptation by natural selection. Genetic variation is very important for the persistence of populations in prairie habitat. We’ll find out how much variation Echinacea has, which will give us some ideas about future prospects for these populations in the rough-and-tumble and rapidly changing world out here.
We got rained out several times this week, but managed to measure all 2526 plants. We found a few plants that escaped detection last summer and we even found one seedling. Welcome to the experiment, fellas! We’ve got our eyes on you.
Overwinter survival appears to be quite good and most of the toothpicks we used to identify individual plants made it through the winter too. The tallest plants were just over 20 cm and some plants had 3 or more leaves. This is great news for plants that were sown as seed in fall 2013. Growth conditions are challenging: a cold winter with little snow, a dry spring, shading out by established plants, chewing by herbivores, … it’s a tough life for a prairie plant.
All in all, it promises to be a great summer. We’ll keep you posted.
We had a great luncheon for our volunteer citizen scientists today. We are grateful to the incredible amount of high-quality work they do for the project. Stuart gave a presentation about our accomplishments during the past year (many) and plans for the summer (focused). Jared presented some results about the effects of fire on reproduction at Staffanson (strong). A fun time was had by all.
At the luncheon we wished Jared well in his future endeavors. Friday is Jared’s last day. I has been great to work with him for the past year. We welcomed Taylor Harris to the Team. She is from Fisk University and will work in Minnesota this summer.
You can read more about the citizen scientists who work on Team Echinacea in our series of profiles recognizing their hard work and dedication volunteering for the Echinacea Project at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Two volunteers declined to have profiles posted due to modesty or to hide their identities as international spies–we won’t blow your cover. Read profiles here.
Stuart forgot to take photos during the event. Fortunately Robin took a group photo, which we will post as soon as we get it.
 Team Echinacea at the volunteer citizen scientist luncheon at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Back row: Shelley, Art, Char, Anne, Leslie, Jessica, Taylor, Stuart
Front row: Gretel, Suzanne, Aldo, Laura, Kathryn, Jared
Not pictured: Bob, Lois, Susie, Susan, Naomi, Marty, Sam, Lou, Bill
|
|
