Monday morning we started out by doing our phenology routes, I was in the northwest/landfill group with Wesley and Allie. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and it made for a stinky morning at landfill! The morning was the fastest morning of phenology yet, we were all back and finished well before lunch. The reason it was so fast was because so many plants were done flowering so we didn’t have to check them. Last Friday we did independent estimates of how many heads we thought were going to be excluded from our routes as of Monday morning. Alex won with an estimate of 521, only 2 off from the correct answer of 519 heads!
Our afternoon consisted of working on independent projects. For me, this meant heading out with Kennedy to P2 to asses style persistence and dust more echinacea for Team Dust. While we were there we saw lots of different critters, ranging from a robber fly (if you haven’t seen one, just know that you don’t want this fly to bite you) to a gopher. The gopher didn’t seem to notice that we were there, it came right up to us! As a future gopher, I was very excited to see my mascot in the field.
Since there was still more time in the afternoon, we went back to Hjelm to see what we could help with. I went out with Wesley to search for liatris in remnants for his independent project assessing liatris and butterflies in the remnants. Some sites didn’t seem to have any, but others were promising! At the end of the day Wesley and I helped Allie with the aphid project and we searched for aphids and looked at different echinacea plants in P1. While we were successful in finishing assessing all of plants, none of us found any aphids. Once we did our chores, we were able to head out for the day and get ready for Tuesday!
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, really it was morning, but the dark and stormy part is true. Regardless, the inclement weather during Tuesday’s early hours wasn’t enough to keep Team Echinacea from taking a road trip to monitor orchid populations in Fertile, MN.
Eight of us, about half the team, left the field house around 7am and drove north for two and a half hours. We stopped only for the necessities, namely the bathroom and donuts. The rain forced us to wait in our vehicles when we arrived at our site, and we were finally able to get to work around 10:30.
Mia watches as Allie takes her turn in a round of cards as we wait for the rain to let up.
The first location we visited required a short hike to access. Though it’s acres upon acres in size, you’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look, which is why we were fortunate we were joined by Gretel Kiefer, who has worked with these orchids and the Nature Conservancy for over decades. A long-time member of Team Echinacea, Gretel is spending most of her summer at the Chicago Botanic Garden, but was able to join us this week for the trip.
Mia and Gretel use a map to determine our location on the plot.
The work itself consisted of moving in groups of four searching 10m by 10m plots for orchid plants. Whenever we found one, we would gather some data on its flowers, give it a numbered flag and use a GPS to mark its exact location. The plots themselves were sometimes a bit difficult to keep track of because many of the markers were fallen over or missing; I can only imagine how difficult it may have beef if there was standing water. Fortunately for us—but perhaps not the plants—this year is a dry one.
Gretel enters data on her visor as Mia prepares a flag. Jared holds the GPS in the background.
After finishing up at the first location, we ate lunch before traveling to the second and final location for the day. Because it would have been a long walk carrying all of our equipment, to get there we all piled in to Stuart’s pickup truck and drove down what I would hesitate to call a road, though we did all make it in one piece.
Alex, Mia and Allie in the truck bed, taunting death on the bumpy road.
Our task for the second location was the same as before, but took much longer due to its larger size. By the time we were finishing up, the sun had come up after hiding behind the clouds all day. We were fortunate that it had been cloudy for most of the day; not only does cloud cover provide some relief from the heat, but, somewhat counter-intuitively, direct sunlight also makes it more difficult to spot individual plants. Once we wrapped up our work around 7pm, we headed south, stopping at a pizza place in Ada on the way back for dinner.
Despite the rain in the early hours, the consensus was that the orchid trip was successful, and indisputably a blast.
Celebratory team selfie after a successful day of orchid searching. (Photo credit Mia Stevens)
Some bonus photos:
Frog.The orchid in question: the western prairie fringed orchidA purple prairie clover with very visible pollenStuart forges his own path through the wet prairie.
The Echinacea Flowers are beginning to all begin flowering at a similar time so the phenology is getting intense. The next few weeks we will be doing phenology Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays adding to the most extensive and accurate data base of Echinacea angustifolia in the world (while also cultivating grit). On Wednesday afternoon about half the crew was able to go to P10 (my favorite) located at West Central Area Schools (WCA) Environmental Learning Center to assess how many of the Echinaceas plants survived from our plantings in 2019. P10 is currently being used by WCA students for research projects and the Echinacea Project to determine how fire affects the prairie. A great opportunity for the students from school in collaboration with future Echinacea Project members.
Some of the Echin in P10 were very small, like 1 cm length leaves.
Kennedy (WCA 2022) and Maris (Wooster College 2022) search for Echin plants on one of the 12 plots located at WCA Schools.
And since I sort of promised a Limerick, here goes:
P1, P10, ologyPhen
Buckthorn, Sumac, Goats in the Pen.
P2,P3, Demography.
What, Wait, Where is P3?
Field Flag Organizer two thouSen.
The Field Flag Organizer 2000F
The members of Team Echin working at P10 (minus Mia as she is taking the pict).
Team Echinacea is off to a great start. We had a wonderful first week. We got a lot done and laid the foundation to work well as a team to accomplish much more this summer. This summer we aim to learn bunches and make many contributions to science and conservation.
Look at our new shirts…
Emma wasn’t in this shot, she getting ready for the state track meet. Best wishes from Team E to Emma & AAHS track and field team at the state meet today!!!
For many months I have been eagerly awaiting summer in the prairie. After a long winter and a busy spring, I found visiting local prairies during the past couple weeks incredibly restorative. Each step is accompanied by a familiar crunch as new “green friends” come into view. Their distinctive color palettes fuse into a vivid mosaic. As the summer progresses, I know incredible hues of green, yellow, white, purple, and orange will wax and wane producing a shifting mosaic of colors that simply enthralls the senses. I know what is coming, yet I can hardly contain my excitement.
Welcome Team Echinacea 2021! Here’s to a safe, productive, and illuminating summer of science filled with kaleidoscopic prairie sunsets and a menagerie of new friends, green and otherwise.
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I joined the Echinacea Project in 2014 as a Research Intern. Before returning to Team Echinacea this winter, I finished up my PhD at UW-Madison in 2020.
Research Interests
I am a plant ecologist and conservation biologist. My research investigates how fire influences the plant reproduction and population dynamics in fragmented prairies.
Statement
In my spare time, I enjoy spending time outdoors: birding; botanizing; exploring the natural world by foot, bike, and canoe; and working on restoration projects. My fascination with ducks borders on obsession.
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 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.
Today the loud lumbering noises came back, it has been a while since they last visited but the day lengths seem similar to last time. The noises got louder when they found me, I guess that means that they were excited to see me again. I wonder if they know that I look forward to their visit every year.
This has been a big year for me I worked really hard and I grew two whole leaves! The longest one is all of seven whole centimeters! My parent plant would be so proud of me! Speaking of the good old ‘rent, I haven’t heard from them in a while. I miss them but I am excited to strike out on my own, I hope that I can flower some day and make them proud.
Anyway, today was a good day since the loud lumbering noises came for their visit and I look forward for when they come and visit again. But for now, I have to go back to getting ready for the cold. I am keeping busy making sure all of my sugars are packed away and ready for midnight snacking.
Sincerely,
M
The Tart Plum Plum Tart is ready for Mary Berry’s approval
Today Emma and I did some sling in the morning when we visited this seeding M. Lea did her last field work of the year this morning! During lunch Drake brought his Tart Plum Plum Tart, to share! It was very good, and we all appreciated the time that picking all of the plums took. In the afternoon Emma and I set off to do some of the little demo left. I got some practice at operating Darwin. Operating Darwin is a bit trickery than I was expecting but with a good teacher like Emma I picked it up fairly quickly.
Me attempting to get the GPS in the exact right spot….
