Chicago Botanic Garden has a new logo! To celebrate its launch, we got to relive the good old days of science fairs. Stationed in the atrium of the plant science center, Wyatt, Stuart, and I chatted with all kinds of people about the work we do!
“Is this prairie healthy?” “How would we know?” These questions helped us engage visitors with discussions on reproductive fitness of populations in fragmented habitats. As Wyatt and I participate in more events like this, we are learning a lot about how to be more effective communicators and how to engage others.
Many curious eyes perused a case of bees from our yellow pan trap experiment
This event was also a great excuse to pull out the column blower, a crowd favorite. Wyatt, donning a t-shirt with our department’s new logo, demonstrated how we use it to separate full and empty achenes.
Today is pi day and we are posing some of our most burning questions for consideration. Here are a few:
How far could you go if you multiplied the number of bb points in our study area by pi? If you took the actual length of the Pomme de Terre River and divided it by its length as the crow flies, would it be pi? If we flipped a coin pi times, would the number of heads be equivalent to bee abundance in a square meter?
Importantly, if you give members of team echinacea a pan, when does pi equal the number of pies made during the field season?
In the lab today we were talking about Fibonacci numbers. Somehow these numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …) relate to Echinacea flowerheads. The number of ray florets (aka “petals”) on ab Echinacea head are often Finbonacci numbers, like 13 & 21, but they are often not those numbers. This Wikipedia page describes the relationship between Fibonacci series and florets on flowerheads.
Here are some images of Echinacea heads from the summer (top views). Do you see any interesting patterns?
Top view of head of Echinacea angustifolia. How may ray florets? Click image to enlarge to see pattern of disk florets.Head of Echinacea angustifolia with two beesTwo heads of Echinacea pallida. This species is not native to Minnesota, but it was planted by accident in a prairie restoration in our study areabeetle on head of Echinacea angustifolia
Team Echinacea seeks undergrads, graduate students, recent grads, high schoolers and teachers to join our summer team! Come hone your skills as an ecologist, conservationist, and evolutionary biologist while engaging in research in western Minnesota’s tallgrass prairies. There will be watermelon!
Members of Team Echinacea summer 2023 team enjoy a snack on the porch after a day of field work
We strive to create an inclusive, collaborative, stimulating, positive, fun, and productive environment for all regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and economic background. We welcome and encourage individuals from groups historically excluded from sciences and conservation. If you are interested in learning about and contributing to science and conservation, please join our team. We are committed to recruiting, training, and supporting individuals interested in science, education, and conservation from diverse backgrounds.
Team Echinacea has a lot of ongoing projects. A lot! Some of them have been running for decades, and some are relatively new. Each project has a unique set of needs in terms of preparation, fieldwork, and post field management. We want to be efficient as each project progresses through the field season and we also want new team members to be able to pick up on the workflows.
PB&Js might be just the thing to answer all our FAQs…
Here are some FAQs on an abstract ggplot PB&J.
This week, Stuart, Wyatt and I are experimenting with the PBJ format (project blueprint and journey). We hope to make easily digestible roadmaps for every project we have going on. These will keep our field season running smoothly (or not, if you like crunchy peanut butter… We have not discussed this yet). This also makes me wonder, what kind of jelly (or jam?!) is best for our PB&Js? I like Bonne Maman fig preserves. I will pitch that to Stuart and Wyatt.
It feels like forever ago that our summer team of plant demographers were taking demo and surv records on thousands of flowering and non-flowering Echinacea plants in the field! But for me, demo and surv work is still front and center, and it gets more exciting every day!
A few weeks ago, I cleaned up the 2023 data that Stuart and Jared kindly loaded into demap. Now, it is time to reconcile entries within years and between years. There is a lot going on in the demap repository where this happens, but luckily, former members of Team Echinacea wrote great protocols and annotated their scripts thoroughly.
On Friday I wrote my first ever “ICE” record (informed census evaluation) for an entry at Kjs. There will be many more to come as I solve little mysteries from data collection. Hopefully soon we will have successfully incorporated 2023 demographic data into our long-term database. Stay tuned!
A very official certification of my first ICE record.
Most of the hundreds (or thousands!) of Echinacea heads we harvest every year are from our common garden experimental plots. But not all of them! We also harvest heads from local prairie remnants to learn about isolated natural Echinacea populations of different sizes. This year, we harvested 125 heads from the remnants, and they’ve begun their journey through our ACE process at CBG!
Next step next time?
The remnant heads are almost all through the first batch in our process, cleaning. By the end of the ACE process, we’ll be able to quantify multiple components of fitness, such as achene count and seed set, for each individual. But for now, one thing at a time!
The Echinacea Project is assembling an enthusiastic team of undergraduates, recent graduates, graduate students, high schoolers and teachers to engage in prairie research during the summer of 2024! Are you an aspiring ecologist, conservation biologist, or evolutionary biologist? Spend time in western Minnesota’s prairies and gain research experience in plant population biology, evolution and quantitative genetics, pollination biology, and plant-insect interactions!
Members of Team Echinacea 2023 measure Echinacea plants in an experimental plot
We strive to create an inclusive, collaborative, stimulating, positive, fun, and productive environment for all regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and economic background. We welcome and encourage individuals from groups historically excluded from sciences and conservation. If you are interested in learning about and contributing to science and conservation, please join our team. We are committed to recruiting, training, and supporting individuals interested in science, education, and conservation from diverse backgrounds.
