It’s raining today. All day. After a long, dry summer, autumn has finally arrived, and it has brought with it some much-needed precipitation. I love the rain, but it does make it somewhat difficult (and very muddy) to conduct fieldwork. Instead of braving the elements, we have been using rainy days to work on our “inside activities.” For me, this mostly means cleaning achenes.
When I say cleaning, I don’t mean that the achenes themselves are dirty. Rather, they are mixed in with chaff left over from the head cleaning process. When we clean achenes, we are simply removing this chaff, which includes receptacular bracts, involucral bracts, corolla tubes, and ray florets. Once we have isolated the achenes, they are ready to be scanned and counted.
Cleaning achenes is a simple, almost meditative process. It requires only a glass tray and a good pair of tweezers. To do it, pour a mix of achenes and chaff from a coin envelope onto the tray. Use the tweezers to carefully extract each achene from the pile of chaff (be careful not to overlook small or misshapen achenes). Scoop the achenes into a labeled envelope and the chaff into another. Repeat. Another achene cleaner will inspect the chaff to confirm that no achenes were missed.
There’s still a lot to be done before the field season is over. We need to finish harvest, revisit “can’t finds” and some total demo records, and finish “DeMopUp.” The next two weeks will probably be a scramble to complete all these tasks and tie up any loose ends we discover along the way. But for now, it’s just me, the achenes, some good music (played just loudly enough to be audible but not distracting) and the occasional snap of a popping viola pod. I’m happy!
Team Echinacea includes many volunteers who help in the lab. Volunteers contribute to all steps in the ACE process to estimate reproductive effort and outcomes in Echinacea plants from experimental plots and observational studies. During 2024, our 16 volunteers devoted 2192.5 hours to the Echinacea Project! Here is a summary of hours.
initials
hours
aw2
886.0
cak
31.5
cs1
177.0
dstc
71.0
eem
7.0
jln
132.5
jrd
56.0
kja
121.5
ljb
55.0
lc2
47.0
ml
106.0
mnm
24.0
mh2
97.0
mdk
3.0
pp
98.0
scb
280.0
TOTAL
2192.5
We are very thankful for our incredible team of volunteers, the Echinacea Project would not be possible without their hard work and dedication!
Today we’re closing the lab for a two week break. Team Echinacea has had a fun and productive year. We worked really hard in the lab and it’s time to take a well-deserved vacation.
We made great strides in the lab this past year quantifying annual reproductive fitness of plants from many experiments, mostly Echinacea angustifolia–the narrow-leaved coneflower. We estimate fruit counts and seed counts in hundreds of heads we harvest each year using the ACE protocol: cleaning heads, rechecking heads, scanning fruits, counting fruits, taking random samples, x-raying samples of fruits, and classifying radiographs. We were way behind because the lab was closed during the pandemic. We are catching up. In the past two months we moved all heads harvested from one experiment in Sept 2024 all the way through counting all fruits of each head three times. We have a really great data set.
Thank you to the volunteers who contributed so much to our science and conservation endeavors. Thank you, everybody. Enjoy your vacation–you deserve it. I look forward to working with everyone in 2025!
Another batch we’re prioritizing in the lab is the pollinator observation (or polOb) experiment. The goal of this experiment is to learn more about the effects of fire on native bees and their behaviors. We spent time this summer observing Echinacea at 10 paired sites, half of which burned before the 2024 growing season. We then harvested heads from our observation plots for processing in the lab. Because we’re specifically interested in learning about pollination, heads in this group will be streamlined all the way through to the classifying steps to learn about seed set, and we are less concerned about counting. Here’s our progress so far:
We are roughly a third of the way through rechecking. We’ll be pausing work briefly on this batch to get the exPt01 2024 experiment rechecked and uploaded for counting ASAP
NOTE: Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
We have a few experiments that we’re prioritizing here in the lab. We want to get the heads in these experiments through our ACE process as quickly as possible! One of these experiments is known by many names: q1, qGen, qGen1, big batch, etc. The experiment in question was planted in experimental plot 1 in 2003 and was designed to investigate the heritability of fitness using a quantitative genetics approach. We’re looking to redo the analysis we have on this experiment with several new years of data, including 2024!
This year, very few plants in exPt01 flowered, so all experiments in that plot were lumped into one for ACE processing. I booted up Alex’s ACE progress visualization machine to see what our progress on this batch looks like so far! We only need to get this batch through counting, so we can skip the randomizing/xray/classifying steps.
Finished with cleaning! Rechecking (here cleanQC) is up next.
For our seed addition experiment, we want to know exactly how many seeds we planted in each 1 m transect. Each transect got seeds from one envelope. Before planting, we took xrays of the fruits in the paper envelopes. With minimal processing, the radiographs look good! We have a batch of 251 images to classify. This sounds like a job for Allen Wagner aka “the Count” (of Achene County).
Radiograph of Echinacea fruits in envelope 105.3a /230. Other partial envelopes are visible on the margins.
We used the column blower and other techniques to remove empty fruits. We aimed for about 50 seeds per envelope. How many do you count?
It’s been a busy spring at the lab: 11 volunteers and 6 students from Northwestern and Lake Forest College contributed to the Echinacea Project. We are currently wrapping up before field season starts, and we want to celebrate everything they accomplished in the last few months! Since January, volunteers and students:
On Friday, volunteers Marty and Mike finished cleaning the last batch of heads from the 2018 common garden experiment. Huzzah! The volunteers had been working on the 2018 heads back before the pandemic started, and after a long break, 2018 is finally done. Many thanks to all the volunteers who made this possible, especially the 2021-2022 crew: Allen, Char, Elif, Laura, Luk, Marty, Mike, and Suzanne! Now, we have a lot of rechecking to do.
So far this year, we have sadly not been able to have volunteers in the lab due to the continuing threat of COVID-19. However, over the last few months, we made quite a bit of progress on the remnant Echinacea harvests from 2020 and 2021. In the fall, we had help from volunteers, students from Lake Forest College, and externs from Carleton College. Thanks for your help! In January, Sophia finished cleaning the last head from 2021, which was an exciting accomplishment.
To track our progress in the lab, I created an R script to visualize the various steps of the ACE process for each batch of Echinacea. The figures for rem2020 and rem2021 are included here. Hopefully, this method will work for the cg harvests as well.
Click on the figures to enlarge
The ACE stages are listed along the x-axis, and the number of Echinacea heads are on the y-axis. The light blue shows how much we have completed, and the dark blue shows what remains to be done. The small numbers on each bar indicate the corresponding number of heads, and the width of the bars is roughly proportional to the amount of time each step takes. Along the top, the dates indicate the last day that the totals for each stage were updated.
The script to create these graphs can be found here: echinaceasandbox/oop/trackAceProgressTest.R
Today, the Lake Forest College students returned for their second day at the lab. After cleaning heads last week, they moved on to the next steps of the ACE process today: quality control and scanning. They worked in teams of two, so one group rechecked cleaned heads from rem2020 and rem2021 while the other group scanned the achenes that had passed the quality control step. The students will have a dataset of 40 echinacea heads from 2021, 20 burned and 20 unburned, as well as 40 heads from 2020. They wondered whether the drought this summer affected seed production in echinacea or whether controlled burns influence achene count, and they developed hypotheses to test these questions.
Alondra and Marina do quality control while Maeve and Connor scan achenes
The new x-ray machine also arrived this week! It showed up in an enormous wooden crate, but fortunately the machine itself is not that large. Today, the company representatives gave us a tutorial of how to operate the x-ray. We will need to do some trials to find the best settings and adjust our protocol to the new machine. For example, we will need smaller sheets of paper to fit in the x-ray. Based on today’s test run, it seems that the x-ray can only hold 15 bags of achenes (3 rows of 5) at a time instead of 20 bags (4 rows of 5). However, each image takes only 45 seconds, so hopefully it won’t slow down the process too much. According to the Kubtec website, this model is also good at x-raying explosives, art, and gems, so I guess that might come in handy, too.
