Last week Stuart, Gretel, Jared, and I headed northward from Chicago to Minnesota to perform the first prescribed burn of the season! On our drive up we hit some snow that was almost whiteout conditions very exciting, especially for April. We arrived in Douglas County late Wednesday night and quickly bundled into our sleeping bags.
Stuart examining the test fire of the Island
The next morning, we walked the unit/p8 and saw two bald eagles flying over the plot, we decided that this was a good omen for the burn. There are two areas in the unit that haven’t been burned in the past that we decided to burn this year, this was the island that is northeast of the plot and the “bee trees”. After examining the unit we set off to prep the unit and gather supplies. After a break for lunch, we ran a test of how the wooded area would burn by burning the island area. This burn went well, the fire moved slowly but we did kill a frog :(. Halfway through this burn Ruth and Frank arrived from the Cities, they were greeted with excitement and backpack sprayers.
After the success of burning through the woods in the island, we decided to burn through the bee trees. The bee trees burned very slowly Frank and I spend most of the burn focused on ensuring that no sparks from the bee’s trees got taken in the wind downhill. To the south of the bee trees, the burn brake is only mowed and still has quite a bit of brome that could be fuel. We were all shocked by the civilized behavior that the fire had around this burn break. Once we had a sufficient backfire Stuart light the head fire in the windward portion of the plot and boy it was spectacular. Our civilized fire politely ripped through the brome of p8 and even left many pin flags untouched!
The backfire heading southThe head fire heading through p8
After we were satisfied with the large p8 unit fire being out we gathered, including John VanKempen who arrived during the course of the p8 burn. We then headed down to Jean’s prairie plant garden and Jared, who was the burn boss for the final two burns, light a nice line around the perimeter of the garden, this burn only took 16 minutes. When we were waiting for the garden to burn we noticed a small adjacent patch of dried duff and we decided to burn that too! This burn went even faster than the prairie garden it was also much more powerful.
The burn crew! Left Gretel, Jared, Mia, John, Ruth, Frank (Stuart not pictured)
After the prairie garden and adjacent area were done burning, Stuart, Gretel, Jared and I made sure that everything was put out back at p8. We found a smoldering log and made some s’mores!
The next day, Jared and I inspected the remnant sites that we are planning on burning. Jared, Stuart, and I also broadcast some native prairie seeds (mostly two grasses: side-oats grama and little bluestem) that we collected in the fall in p8.
We performed this burn a week ago now, on Earth Day, performing a prescribed burn that aids in the restoration of the prairie was a wonderful way to celebrate. This was my first prescribed burn, overall it was really fun, impressive, exciting, and also boring. I am very excited to be heading back up to Minnesota to conduct more burns but also to see how the community changes after the burn.
The charred and snow-sprinkled plot on Saturday morning
Hi again, it’s Emma––it’s been three weeks already and I’ve finished the majority of data analysis for my independent project! I presented about it at our lab meeting this morning and it was good to show what I’ve learned to the team and to get some helpful feedback.
To summarize my experiment’s goal, I was investigating whether there are differences in microhabitat between areas with surviving Echinacea seedlings and areas where Echinacea seedlings established but have died. This involved collecting data on site characteristics like litter depth, vegetation cover, slope, aspect, distance to roads and fields, plant community composition, and floral neighborhood at circles where seedlings monitored in the Sling project sprouted between 2007-2013. After analyzing my data, I can report that I found no differences in microhabitat between living and dead seedlings, and that I did not find differences in survival by prairie remnant, either. This suggests that the microhabitat variables I collected data on are likely not the most important factors driving seedling survival and mortality in this long-lived prairie perennial plant. Instead I propose that other factors, like climate, soil moisture & nutrients, pesticide drift, light limitation, herbivory, and genetics, may have greater impact on whether seedlings establish or die. Luckily the Sling project is ongoing and members of Team Echinacea are working to find out what drives seedling fitness in fragmented Echinacea populations!
I learned a LOT about doing data analysis in R during this project. I’m super grateful to Mia and Stuart for all the help they gave me when I had questions about R during the internship! The highlights probably are learning about, and doing, some multivariate analysis and using the R package vegan. It was so cool getting to create my own NMDS and species accumulation graphs after seeing them in many ecology papers I’ve read. From here I plan to do a few final analyses and edits with the intention of presenting my project findings at an ecology conference next summer.
That’s all from me for now! Stay tuned for a groovy poster…
It’s Emma Greenlee back for part 2 of my independent project, data analysis! My project draws from the Sling project, in which Team Echinacea annually tracks the survival of Echinacea seedlings that originated between 2006-2013 for an extensive record of survival and mortality in these seedlings. During my internship with the Echinacea Project this past summer I collected data in the hopes of finding out whether Sling seedling survival varies with microhabitat characteristics. Now that Carleton is on our 6-week-long winter break, I’m analyzing that microhabitat data with the goal of putting together a poster to present at an ecology conference next summer.
After a week of working on this, starting from a fairly low level of R knowledge, I have learned a lot and feel like I’m still very early in the process. I started the week doing some R tutorials and lessons and checked in with Mia daily on Zoom to talk about any questions I had. She set up a nice outline to help me get started and has been really helpful, so shout out to Mia! I have spent most of my time cleaning my data, which is separated into two data sets, one containing microhabitat data on litter depth, vegetation cover, slope, aspect, distance to roads and fields, and plant community composition in each sling circle, and the other containing records of all flowering species and number of inflorescences at each sling circle. Once it’s formatted how I want I will start some exploratory data analysis, hopefully at the start of next week.
I also got to go to the Echinacea Project’s zoom lab meeting this morning, where the group discussed an outline for the introduction to the sling paper Lea is working on. It was nice to see everyone, and to hear about how the sling research will translate to papers and the kinds of decisions that are involved in thinking about how to set up a research paper. This morning there was also a seminar put on by the CBG where speakers representing Plants of Concern, restoration research at the garden, the Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie seedbank, and Budburst presented a little about their projects and how other collaborators can get involved. A common theme among the presenters was an emphasis on citizen science and even “community science,” a term I hadn’t heard before but thought was awesome.
Just looking at the vegan package for R made me feel like a real ecologist this week, looking forward to continuing to build on what I know next week.
Yesterday Stuart and I took a trip into the Garden! This was the first trip into the Garden for me which I was very excited about. Stuart showed me around the lab and I have a much better sense of the ACE process now.
As we walked around the lab there was this almost eerie feeling. Almost like someone had stepped out mid-day for lunch, and Stuart and I being there is disrupting their work.
Char’s cleaning was interrupted, this didn’t stop the spiders from building a web…This patch was half way through being randomized, and just stoppedTime has actually frozen in March… but no more
Hopefully I can start the inventory process on all of heads collected in 2020 soon! It’s all just so exciting!
I’ve relocated! Stuart and I finished up the last of field work on Friday and have moved back to Chicago. I moved into my new apartment on Saturday!
Rain passing by p1
Last week we finished up many tasks including, p1 harvest, demo, remeasuring any problem records in p1, pulled all flags in p2, p7 and p9. Overall it was a great week we got a lot done!
P2 before it was de-flaggedP2 after it was de-flagged
I celebrated my birthday last Monday by making myself some apple crisp. It was very yummy!
The birthday crisps!
I am definitely going to miss Minnesota but am very excited about my new adventure in Evanston!
As we have mentioned previously on the flog in all of the experimental plots we measure every plant every year. We mainly need to know if the plants are alive each year. We also measure various other traits, for example leaf length and number.
As you might suspect we don’t find every plant every year we call these plants “can’t finds.” To ensure that these plants really not there and we didn’t just miss them we search these positions again.
I have been working on going through the recheck data, cleaning things up a bit and fixing any problems. I have also calculated the re-find rate for three of the plots that we have measured. For p8 the re-find rate was 2.0%, in p679 which has hybrids of E. angustifolia and E. pallida planted in it, the re-find rate was a whopping 14.0%. Lastly in p1 which is our largest experimental plot had a re-find rate of 10.1%.
I find the range in re-find rates among the plots interesting, the low re-find rate in p8 would correspond with the higher mortality rate in this plot. P679 had the highest re-find rate at 14.0%, this plot was the first plot that we measured. I would suspect that over time we have gotten better at measuring and finding plants. If we measured these plots later in the season some of the positions that we recorded as can’t finds we would have found with more experience. This would lower the re-find rate.
Overall, I think that the team did a really great job at measuring and rechecking, it was a lot of work, but I think we worked hard and got things done very efficiently. I know the re-find rates aren’t actually that high, but I was somewhat shocked how high the rates were.
In other news I finished harvesting all of the heads from the remnants, and finished Demo at all of the sites other than near town hall.
I am heading down to Illinois at the end of the week, Stuart and I will be wrapping up field work this week. I am excited about the move and to start work at the Garden, but I am also sad to leave Minnesota. I have enjoyed being in the wide opened skies and the fresh air.
Stuart and I took a wander out though the corn to do demo at Krusmarks. It was a very erry walk through the corn.
Later in the week Amy came up from the cities to work on her addition to p1. Amy is planning on planting the seeds created during her inter-remnant crosses this year. She is adding to p1 in the south east corner, now this portion of the plot is being encroached by sumac. Now little baby Echinacea and sumac do not mix therefore, we are trying to decrease the amount of sumac in the area. In order to do this first we cut all of the tall grass to expose the sumac. Then we applied herbicide to the sumac in order to apply the herbicide in a systematic way we set up “swimming lanes.” We will see how effective our efforts are in the spring, but I sure think that it worked well.
Amy and Stuart cutting the grass of the tallgrass prairie Anyone feel like going for a dip?
This week Stuart is back in IL, I have been continuing to work on harvest and wrapping up demo and p1 rechecks.
Last night I made apple pie from apples at the farm! I had never done a basket weave crust before, but it was fun to figure out as I go!
As you know the majority of the team has now gone back to school, so now it is just me and Drake. The last week has taken a turn towards fall, the average temperature has been around 55F. There has also been an ever so slight change in coloration vegetation, the soybean and corn plants have turned more yellow than green, the sumacs have gone from green to a nice dark red. The Indian grass in p1 has been turning yellow and has been falling over. Even some of the Echinacea are getting ready for Halloween!
Some colorful sumacsSilly Echinacea Halloween is next month!
This week I have been working on p1 harvest, harvest from the remnants, and some maintenance in p8. Part of the p8 maintenance is trimming out all of the big blue stem and Indian grass. As I worked on that task I couldn’t help thinking of the line from Alice in Wonderland, “painting the roses red”. I couldn’t help but see the irony in trimming grasses out of the prairie, however we do have a rational in trimming the grasses other than just to avoid trouble with the Red Queen. By removing the flowering stems of big blue stem and Indian grass before they set seed, we can decrease their spread through the plot.
This week I also spent some quality time with Darwin shooting all of the flowering E. pallida.
Darwin enjoying the view of the fall prairie clouds
In the upcoming week I will continue to work on the various harvests, and p1 rechecks.
Hey Flog, just one more person saying bye! What an awesome experience I had on Team Echinacea this summer. I appreciated the community and learned a lot from the age and experience range of the team. I learned a lot of new skills, from assessing flowering phenology to using a survey-grade GPS to conducting an independent project to becoming familiar with new plant species! The age stratification of the team also got me thinking about both learning from people and being someone others could learn from. With such a variety of work this summer I was never bored, often felt challenged by the responsibilities I was trusted with, and got to enjoy the company of an awesome group of people.
I enjoyed one last day of demo with Mia and Anna 🙂Living at Andes was great, especially because Lea and Mia were two awesome housemates. Hoping the ATH team compensates me for use of this publicity photo.I got shocked by electric fences twice this summer. Glad this goat (or a similar-looking friend) got to share one of those moments with meNot grass corner this week but the last species I made a visor record for on my project (Symphyotrichum laeve), plus a flying BombusAww! Sharing a special moment with my sister when she visited. It’s fun when you have people to share it with!
The next few weeks I’ll be thinking of Mia and Drake as they wrap up harvest and the field season! See you next time!
Yesterday was my last day with Team Echinacea. I’m sad to say goodbye so soon, but my Junior year of high school is calling me. I had an amazing summer with the team, and I learned so much about plants and the prairie in a unique experience I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.
It wasn’t just my last day yesterday, but also Lea, John, and Emma’s. We wrapped up our time together with one last goat-herding excursion, some packing, and a little bit of demo before our early lunch.
At lunch, we had some delicious vegan chocolate cake (Thank you Jean for all the cakes you’ve made us this summer!) and sat in our 2020 grass-circle for the last time. John and Lea’s puppy pals came to visit too! I’m going to miss our little spot under the oak trees, but I won’t miss the constant fear of acorn-pelting…
Who’s a good boy? Clyde’s a good boy!Huxley and Velmie came to visit too!
In the afternoon, Emma, Mia and I went out to Hegg Lake/P2 to shoot demo on some recruitment sites. I got some quality time with Darwin in the car while we drove, and Emma was able to shoot one final site with him. I think it was a pretty sentimental experience for the both of us.
MYSTERY DOGS!! These guys were hanging out on the side of the road as we drove by… we thought they were coyotes, but we were pleasantly surprised!“don’t speak to me or my son ever again” Just kidding! Darwin and I are very social
At the end of the day, we cleaned up Hjelm as much as we could, returned our equipment, and said the final good-byes for the summer. I’m going to miss Team Echinacea as Fall and Winter come, but I’m hoping to visit again next summer. Thank you to all the people who helped me grow as a scientist and student. I wouldn’t exchange this summer for anything, and I’m grateful we were given the chance to come together in 2020.
