Description: Starting in 1995 for his dissertation, Stuart began mapping and collecting demographic information on hundreds of individual plants in several populations of Echinacea angustifolia. The number populations monitored increased in 1996 and 1997 and now includes 30 remnant prairies. Remnant Echinacea populations vary widely, from small roadside patches of prairie with less than 10 individual plants to the Staffanson Prairie Preserve with well over 1000 individuals within our transect and more than 10,000 individuals in the entire preserve. For each plant that we visit, we record whether the plant is alive, whether the plant is flowering, and how many flowering heads it produces. With this extensive dataset, we hope to explore inter-annual flowering patterns, assess longitudinal plant fitness, and monitor numerical population dynamics in remnant populations of Echinacea.
Start year: 1995
Location: more than 30 remnant prairies in and near Solem Township, Minnesota
Products:
Wagenius, S. 2006. Scale dependence of reproductive failure in fragmented Echinacea populations. Ecology 87:931-941. PDF | Supplemental Material
Project “demap” – organized survey, demography, and phenology data.
Overlaps with: fire and flowering at SPP, flowering phenology in remnants
Read updates about this experiment on our flog (field blog) as written by members of Team Echinacea.
