Its that time of the year when the grass is drying out and the kids are going back to school, and that includes me! I am off to the University of Minnesota to pursue a degree in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. This summer has been so much fun even though it was a short two months. I got to meet three wonderful people along the way, and together we made quite the team. We worked hard, and played even harder–as seen in our victory at trivia night.
Even in my second summer I learned so much. Together we discussed in depth, the experiments that are held in each of the common gardens. Coming out of the discussions left me with a bigger understanding and respect for the project that I didn’t quite have before.
Even though we played hard outside of work, work was still fun. This summer was filled a lot of shenanigans that I didn’t get to experience last summer. We had visitors from St. Olaf that helped us measure ExPt02. Not only were they a great help, we had a fun time making supper for them and going out on Lake Oscar together. I also got to do a lot more common garden maintenance than last summer, which was surprisingly fun.
Overall, I had a great summer working with Maria, Max, Stuart, Wyatt, and Yavonne. I learned more about the project, met cool people, and I have more great stories to tell for college ice breakers. Learning about the prairie has sent me on a path of life that I never expected and I hope someday that this path leads me back to the Echinacea Project once more.
The Underdog Team: The Angry AstersStuarts Self-Proclaimed “Best Work”Our Matching FootwearTeam Echinacea 2026
Prairie once covered the western Minnesota landscape, but due to European settlement and farming practices, only a little over 1% of this remains today, mainly on roadsides, hillsides, and other patches too difficult to farm. The native Minnesota purple coneflower, Echinacea angustifolia, serves as a model organism for studying these remnant prairies and whether they are persisting. Echinacea cannot self-fertilize, and it depends on pollination from another echinacea plant to reproduce. In small, isolated populations, we know that mating between closely related plants can cause inbreeding depression which negatively affects a population’s ability to persist long-term.But we don’t yet know whether the size of a remnant prairie itself directly affects that persistence and whether these smaller populations are still worth holding on to.Therefore, to answer this question and inform how conservation resources are directed, we continue “total demo” which is a census that revisits previously recorded flowering plants across remnant prairies. Guided by stake files loaded onto high-precision GPS units, we locate each plant on our total demo visit list and record its identification tag, flowering status, number of flowering heads, number of rosettes, and nearby neighbors. This data lets us compare mortality and persistence in populations of varying sizes.
Maria, Aaron, and Yavonne in the field doing total demo
So far this season, we’ve completed total demo at 25 small sites, visiting 777 locations where flowering plants had previously been recorded with an average of about 31 locations per site, ranging from as few as 1 to as many as 89. Next, we’re moving on to 18 large sites with an average of 104 locations each. Given the time and effort it would take to revisit every recorded plant at these larger sites, we instead visit a representative subsection. To help fill in the gaps, we pair this with a flowering plant survey, which catches flowering heads that aren’t on this year’s total demo list. Total demo will continue to keep us busy for a while!
So many monarchs this time of year!Hello leopard frog
Now that Team Echinacea 2026 is more than half-way done with our season, were doing some house keeping items to help fill the time, one of which is killing weeds in our experimental plots! Our biggest weed to kill right now is Rhus glabra, or smooth sumac. Although sumac is a native plant to Minnesota, it makes ours, and Echinacea angustifolias, life a whole lot harder out in the common gardens. It spreads very fast when not managed, and makes walking through much more difficult.
We tested two types of application of triclopyr on sumac. In ExPt01, we worked by ourselves and applied triclopyr to the bottom 10cm of each stem. In ExPt02 we worked in pairs, one person would chop the tops off of sumac and the other would apply the herbicide to the top 10cm of the available plant, including the exposed top. We found that our application in ExPt02 went faster and made application easier.
Both applications of herbicide on sumac were not in the plots themselves but were on the borders of the plots. Soon we will work on herbicide application in the common gardens.
The Southwest Border of ExPt02The Southeast Border of ExPt02Myself, Ready to Utterly Demolish Several Box Elder Trees
Team echinacea has completed the survey of flowering plants at our largest remnant and restored prairie sites, collecting data on their geospatial locations, number of normal and other heads (gone, duds, vertical developments, even a few mowed), and the tag number for each plant that assigns its identity. We visited 17 large sites, finding nearly 400 flowering plants!
Seeing new corners of Grant and Douglas counties as we drive to the sites is always a fun time, along with all the creature encounters. Pictured are curious cows along the road and one of many katydids, not pictured are a couple corn spiders and a bird’s nest!
After finishing surveying at these large sites and as we were to begin the process of total demo, we ran into a bit of an issue with our flag situation. Since total demo uses 5 flags (pink, blue, orange, red, and yellow), and white and neon flags also had been designated with a role, we were in need of a flag color for plants demoed and not surved. After much discussion and a unanimous group vote, we are happy to unveil our new flag color combo: red + blue. Here’s a chart that explains the situation (see if you can decipher it):
Now the team continues to visit smaller sites, revisiting past flowering plants and collecting demographic information. More updates to come!
Mooing at cows on the way to rileyMama katydid lounging on Collins (our GPS unit)
Team Echinacea established quantitative genetics experiments to quantify additive genetic variance of fitness in Echinacea, with the idea that we can estimate evolutionary potential of study populations. The plants in qGen2 and qGen3 are offspring of the 1996, 1997, and 1999 cohorts. These plants were crossed with pollen from plants in remnants to produce seed for qGen2 and qGen3, which now inhabit exPt08. Originally, 12,813 seeds were sown in the common garden. Seeds from the same cross (shared maternal and paternal plants) were sown in meter-long segments between nails. This year we visited 1388 positions, found 758 basal plants, and 261 flowering plants.
We are one month into our 2026 field season! We have done so much and have shared so much, but right now, we are here to recap.
Big Accomplishments
Finished measuring Experimental Plots 2, 7, 8, 9.
Finished extracting seed from last years harvested flowering head.
Hosted visitors form St. Olaf, who helped us measure Experimental Plot 2.
To-Do List
Finish measuring Experimental Plot 1.
Finish surveying and doing demography our large remnant and restoration sites.
While these lists are short they pack some punch. We are over half way with both objectives in our To-Do List–but that still means we have to visit 1000+ potential plants in Experimental Plot 1. But that is enough about the future, lets talk about right now.
What is Demography and Survey, and why do we do it? We take surveys on each flowering plant, each year, at each of our remnant and restoration sites, to record the reproductive health of purple cone flower (Echinaceaangustifolia) plants. Then, we use our fancy GPS units to take the coordinates of the purple cone flowers to help us understand population densities and the survival of the same plant year-over-year. Doing these in tandem helps us add to a data base that is over 30 years old, which in turn helps us understand how populations of fragmented prairie plants change over time.
2026 Team Echinacea; Max R, Yavonne V, Maria H, and Aaron B
We so excited to attend Horticulture Night at WCROC and to see our wonderful lead researcher, Stuart, talk about tallgrass prairie!
This summer, Team Echinacea will be conducting ACE (Always Counting Echinacea, Achene Chaos Extraordinaire, Awesome Collaborative Experience, etc.) on the flowering echinacea heads collected during the 2025 field season to measure pollination success. For each head, the end goal is to get an accurate count of the number of achenes produced and the seed viability. Click here to learn more about echinacea seedheads.
Currently, we are working on both completing the inventory on 2025 collected heads and have begun cleaning (i.e. removing seeds from) high priority heads for three experiments: exPt08, polLim (pollen limited), and aphids. This has provided the team with a much needed indoor task during recent 90° and/or poor air quality afternoons.
So far, we’ve completed inventory for our 1st and 2nd priority bags of echinacea heads and 45% of our 3rd priority bags. For cleaning, we have completed all of polLim, are halfway through exPt08, and have yet to begin aphids. Still a ways to go!
During the cleaning process, we found a little stowaway in one of the heads. Our visiting lepidopterist Michael LaScaleia put our new friend under the microscope and declared him living! Shortly after, we rehomed the little guy. Since his chance of success is so low, no name has been given out of fear of attachment.
On a smokey, eerie day, a mysterious group of travelers washed ashore the porch of Hjelm–to no ones surprise of course… it was planned! This week Team Echinacea was visited by St. Olaf Colleges Natural Lands Team, and Student Reserachers from St. Olaf and Carleton College! The guest team was happy to help us out with measuring, and the even bigger goal of finishing ExPt02!
On the first day, we were unfortunately smoked out for a few hours, but that just meant that we had more time to get to know each other and help the new team get a hand on the Visors! After our ice breakers and lunch, we headed out to ExPt02 and got the new group accustomed with our surroundings and Echinacea angustifolia. Our day ended with 36 completed rows!
That eve, the visiting team was so gracious to let us cook them dinner–which was an awesome taco bar. We chatted, gossiped, and schemed the evening activities around the dinner table. That night, we swam, kayaked, canoed, and exercised our entomologist brains.
The next, and final day, we hit the day running, finishing ExPt02–all before lunch! With little time after our meal, we visited Staffanson’s Prairie Preserve and wandered to our hearts content. Finally, we wished our friends goodbye, wishing to have another similar gathering soon.
Anna and AriaMaria and LilyTaiga and MaxYavonne and SheaMeg and RuthJayme and AaronMichael and KiranCicada Nymph at Lake Oscar
Overall, we were not sure how well a new team would behave in a new environment doing research on a plant they have little knowledge about, but our expectations were surpassed. The visiting team helped us complete one of our highest priorities for the summer in two days! They were happy and willing to learn in such a short span of time. We estimate that it took ~84 person-hours to complete–which would have taken our 4 person team, approximately 4 days. Again, we thank the St. Olaf Natural Lands Team and the St. Olaf and Carleton Student Researchers for coming to learn about the prairie and helping build this important data set.
Please feel free to read more about Experimental Plot 02 on this website by searching “ExPt02”. Attached is the protocol we used to collect data during during the 2026 field season.
With echinacea identification under our belt, it was time to get acquainted with our new friend: stipa. (Officially Hesperostipa spartea, but we’re on a first-name basis now.) While it blends in better among the other grasses, we learned the tell of its long, wispy, thread-like leaves. And of course, the flowering culms reminiscent of a porcupine with their quill-like awns.
As we visited our new stipa friends in exPt01, we were met by a variety of personalities: large, outgoing stipa who made their presence known from meters away; sneaky characters who attempted to elude our sight; self-care stipa taking a year off from flowering; a couple of rogue stipa who sprung up somewhere unexpected; and of course, those unfound who may have passed away this year. Rest in peace. We also encountered a few creatures along the way, including a large garter snake who, while very friendly, likely did not want to be our long-term sidekick and was thenceforth returned to the cool earth.
Over the 4th of July weekend, I visited Willow River State Park in Wisconsin, where I put my new stipa identification skills to use in the wild and located a stipa plant, pictured below. I was very excited. My hiking-mates smiled and nodded, not quite under the same stipa spell as I. Can you spot the stipa?
After waiting for the improved visibility of a cloudy overcast to conduct one final search through exPt01, the day arrived and we found the final 19 flowering stipa plants still lingering among the grasses, concluding our stipa collection expedition.
Overall, we found 100 flowering plants and 52 basal plants this season. The total culm count was 358 with one plant having 24 culms. Of the 152 plants, 40 were at locations not planned on being searched this year, meaning they may have been marked as missing the past couple years when a plant was still there. Two were rogue plants (new offspring). This was a big year for flowering stipa, as last year there were only 44 flowering plants but 150 basal plants.
Congratulations to Maddie Sadler! Maddie graduates this weekend with a Masters degree from Northwestern University. Well done, Maddie! Last night the Program in Plant Biology and Conservation hosted a very nice ceremony for 17 graduates. Stuart, Gretel, and Maddie’s parents, brother, & friends attended, including Maddie DiMarco. It was great to see everyone at this joyful event.
Maddie’s thesis title: Asteraceae species richness along Minnesota prairie corridor: what types of prairie harbor the most diversity
