Hello Echination! It’s me again, Riley. I’m finally returning to regular summer flogs, and I am beyond excited to be doing so. As regular flog subscribers may know, I spent the winter with Team Echinacea at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and I have been looking forward to adventures in west-central Minnesota for a while now. I like to think my return to the prairie was as epic as Kurt Angle’s TNA debut.
Nonetheless, we had a productive team day today. This morning, Anna M, Mia, and I went out to hybrid exPt7 and exPt9 and flagged the plots for future measuring. It went very smoothly relative to previous years! Additionally, we found a flowering plant in experimental plot 7! We expect it is either an Echinacea pallida plant or a hybrid. I think it may be in the same plant that flowered in 2018 in exPt7. Other team members weeded in exPt1 this morning, and Erin worked on preparing Darwin to stake and shoot plants in the remnants. Finally, Amy W and Emma went to remnants to take demography records on plants that have initiated flowering.
We had a fun lunch and headed over to West Central Area High School for an afternoon of meetings. First, we talked about team norms and expectations over Zoom. We started by trying to all Zoom from the same room, but that was a disaster. We decided to split into separate rooms, and the meeting went well thereafter. Finally, we talked as a group (this time, in-person) about COVID-19 expectations and preparedness. Once again, our meeting went well, and we have clearer ground rules to mitigate COVID transmission opportunities.
Well, flog readers, thanks for having me! I’ll talk to ya soon!!! Peace out Echination.
First rays up of the year in the study area!! (except we think it’s pallida. rat.)
At the Echinacea Project Evanston Outpost Riley and I have been chugging along with our work for the past two and a half months. We’ve had countless remote meetings, surrendered precious square feet of floorspace to binders of datasheets, migrated the infallible sticky-note kanban to our walls (me) and online (Riley,) and begun coordinating with our summer team to prepare for the field season. Expect to see some new faces on the flog in the coming week!
We started on the northwest corner of P1 and split into two groups to work around the plot. The burn was long and slow!
As we approach the field season, we’ve gotten the chance to stretch our legs outside our apartment. In late May a team dashed up to the field site to capitalize on a narrow window of perfect burn conditions. Changeable winds made our burn of the 99-south plot a little more exciting than we had hoped, but we took the burn low and slow and very safely across experimental plot 1.
Drake headed up to our field site several weeks ago, where he’s been germinating seeds for a parasite competition experiment he’ll conduct this summer. When we return to the field in a couple weeks we’re looking forward to seeing the hoop houses he’ll have set up to house his plants!
Drake is planning to germinate some 40 plant species this summer, but he forgot our favorite species in Illinois– Echinacea angustifolia! Riley and I have gotten special permission to return to the Chicago Botanic Garden to start a pre-germination treatment of Echinacea achenes in the lab. I’ll bring Drake the achenes when I drive out to the field site in the next couple weeks– what are the odds that radicles start emerging in my car?
It’s been exciting to get back to the garden, though we may look a little different from the last time we were here!
The garden will start a limited reopening next week, when visitors will be allowed to walk the perimeter of the grounds. We took a peek outside when we were preparing the pre-germinants, and it looks like the grounds crew have been doing a beautiful job maintaining the garden. We’re excited to see more before we head back to Minnesota!
Sadly, Riley and I have also made use of our visits to the garden to clean out our desks. Access to the plant science building is limited and we will not be working full-time there again, as we are headed off to graduate school following the field season. This will be the first time Riley and I have lived apart since meeting last June! However, we’ll only be a few states apart– Riley is headed to the University of Georgia in Athens, GA and I’ll be at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.
Once a team member, always a team member
As the field season gears up, we will return to our daily summer flogging schedule. We’re all very excited to get out to the field and to meet the new team members!
In conjunction with the CBG’s current policy, the Echinacea Project’s base of operations has moved out of the Plant Science building and into our living room! The lab is closed to volunteers and staff through the month of March and potentially longer as the situation develops. Despite this hiccup, we are continuing with our work and we’re looking forward to the productivity the next few weeks will offer!
All three species are represented in this tray
Over the last few months we’ve been germinating E. angustifolia, pallida and purpurea for our investigation into Echinacea ploidy. Elif, Riley and myself have been caring for the seedlings and will be working with people at the CBG to determine how we can maintain an appropriate watering schedule and safe social distancing practices.
Fingers crossed the little guys can hang in there til we get a schedule worked out!
Though our ACE head processing protocol is on hold for the foreseeable future, our excellent volunteer force has made great progress in 2020. We’re about 3/4s through cleaning the 2018 heads. Our counters are overflowing with cereal boxes of achene envelopes and with help from the volunteers, Riley cleared up some space by moving our 2015 achenes into the Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank (fancy title for “that big freezer on the other side of the building.”) We’ll be moving 2016 in there too when we return!
There’s plenty of work for us to do outside of the lab, so fear not our idle hands! Riley’s looking ahead to the 2020 field season by preparing for measuring in our common gardens. He’s working on a snappy measuring field checks function to hopefully streamline a process which took us a lot of time in Fall 2019.
Currently I’m working on uniting our 2019 demo and surv records in demap. First I tackled our largest 2019 flowering site (Aanenson,) and now I’m working through sling sites to hopefully have maternal plant data ready for our collaborative sling project.
The superteam of Team Echinacea members and alums working on sling in 2019/20 is hopeful about making some great progress in the coming weeks. Perhaps this cross-country collaboration was the original social distancing initiative? Video calls are the hip new quarantine hangout these days, so we were ahead of the curve on that front!
comfy!
classy!
Since we’re now the masters of the office dress code, we’ve been stretching our fashion wings. I’ve busted out my favorite slippers and jeans, and Riley’s switching up his hat game from baseball to brimmed. Check back in with us in a few weeks– we’re working on getting our Spring 2020 collection ready for debut!
This weekend I traveled to the University of Georgia for a graduate student recruitment event (“Go Dawgs,” as they say,) and stumbled upon Echinacea Project alum Laura Leventhal! We rode on a shuttle from the ATL airport to campus in silence for 2 hours and then, having realized our connection, terrified the other passengers in the last 5 minutes of the journey by jabbering about Team Echinacea, the Hjelm House, goats, phenology and more.
We thought we’d seen the last of each other when we split up at TSA, and then coincidentally reunited while contemplating whether or not to buy airport mac and cheese (verdict: not.)
Laura was on the team in 2016 and worked at the Chicago Botanic Garden through the CLM program. Currently she works at UC Davis as a lab manager and is currently interviewing for PhD programs in biology. We had a great time getting to know more about each other in person than we could from reading old flog posts. I found out that Laura heard my undergraduate PI Dr. Joshua Puzey speak at a conference, and that my friend is currently applying to work with a PI at UC Davis whom Laura knows! The world of ecology is, occasionally, delightfully small.
Best wishes to Laura as she continues interviewing and I’m crossing my fingers for more Team Echinacea reunions in our travels!
This past week, I continued work on multiple projects. I continued to recheck and label cleaned Echinacea heads, growing the supply of achenes that are ready to be scanned, so that we can keep the samples moving through the steps. I also spent considerable time on randomizing. I resorted the informative and uninformative achenes from some of the 2013 and 2014 collection so that they are organized in the same way as more recent samples and so protocol is consistent across the board. After resorting was complete, I did the standard randomization protocol on achenes from 2018.
In addition to working with the Echinacea collection, I continued to organized the native bee collection. One task in particular has been going through the specimens, checking the SPID numbers, and checking them off on a data sheet to confirm which specimens still exist in the collection and which ones have been removed or discarded. I have labeled each smaller box within the cases with Roman numerals and have recorded on the data sheet in which box each specimen can be found. I will continue this project in the last few days of my internship and hopefully complete it so that there is a definite record of the specimens in the native bee collection.
Echinacea pallida is a species of Echinacea that is not native to
Minnesota. It was mistakenly introduced to our study area during a restoration
of Hegg Lake WMA. Since 2011, Team Echinacea has visited the pallida restoration and taken flowering
phenology and collected demography on the non-native. This year, we decapitated
all flowering Echinacea pallida to
avoid interspecific pollination with the local Echinacea angustifolia. We fear that Echinacea hybrids may be infertile, so we want to avoid the
establishment of as many hybrids as possible.
This year, a team slogged through the Hegg Lake restoration to find flowering Echinacea pallida. We recorded the number of heads on each plant, the number of rosettes (some plants were absolutely massive), shot gps points at all plants, and then chopped the flowering heads off! We visited the restoration and cut E. pallida heads off on July 8th, 9th and 10th of 2019. We revisited plants and shot gps points for them on July 11th, July 12th, and August 1st.
You can distinguish E. pallida and angustifolia heads by pollen color; E. angustifolia has yellow pollen, but E. pallida has white pollen (above).
Overall, we found and shot points
for 97 flowering E. pallida. On
average, each plant produced 2.5 flowering heads. That’s way more than an
average E.angustifolia!The average
rosette count was 5.4, another big number! The largest plant had 23 rosettes.
We collected tissue samples of E. angustifolia, E. pallida, and known hybrids so Elif can assess ploidy at the Chicago Botanic Garden using the flow cytometer.
Start year: 2011
Location: Hegg Lake
Wildlife Management Area Restoration
Data collected: Demography data, head counts, rosette counts, gps points shot for each E. pallida. Cut Echinacea pallida heads, tissue samples for ploidy analysis. Find demo and phenology visor records in the aiisummer2019 repository. Phenology visor records were taken when we cut heads and demography records were taken when we shot GPS points. GPS points can be found in Demap.
This last week at CBG has been busy and exciting! I’ve collected a lot of interesting data about optimal conditions for stimulating germination in rope dodder, checking my scarified seed treatments each day for radicle protrusion. It seems like rope dodder favors balmy incubation conditions, and scarification with acid and boiling water are both effective in ending the seeds’ primary dormancy. If you’d like to know more about my findings, check out my poster below!
Rejoining Team Echinacea again this winter has been wonderful. Carrying out this independent germination project has challenged me to apply my knowledge and skills in experimental design and analysis to a different kind of study than I had ever attempted. I am very grateful to Stuart and Drake for all of their help and guidance along the way. Even though I was only at CBG for two weeks, I have learned so much during that time, and I look forward to bringing everything I’ve learned here into my future endeavors as a scientist.
Today marks the end of an awesome three weeks! Today all four of us presented our individual projects at this morning’s lab meeting. All went quite well, and it was really fun to be able to present the interesting results to the questions I have been thinking about for the last couple weeks. Here’s my report about climate factors and flowering phenology!
This afternoon we had the opportunity to meet with Andrea Kramer, another scientist in the building, and talked about the struggle and importance of getting scientists and land managers seeing eye to eye to make real progress in conservation and restoration.
We also set up the seeds from three different Echinacea species – angustifolia, pallida, and purpurea – for germination for a new ploidy experiment!
All the best
Adding florel solution to the germination blottersAchenes ready for germination!
It has been an awesome time here at the Echinacea project, attending lab meetings, experiencing the ins and outs of a long term ecology lab, and getting to work with an awesome team of people!
Today is the end of what has been a really cool externship! I’ve had a really nice time the last three weeks––Stuart, Riley, and Erin did a great job of helping us get a sense of what it’s like working in an ecology research lab and introducing us to what’s going on in the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Plant Science building. Some of the highlights for me were attending Echinacea Project lab meetings, getting a sense of what the building’s and lab’s culture is like through the office holiday party and an after-work get-together at Stuart and Gretel’s house, and doing a small independent research project. My project was on the impacts of inbreeding on survival and reproduction in Echinacea, and it was a great chance to get some practice using R, developing a project, and presenting it, and I learned a lot both about the study system and about doing research in general!
Working on the Echinacea Project also helped me further pinpoint what’s important to me in a career––doing something that makes a tangible positive impact on the environment and on the planet––and helped me better understand how a career in research might allow me to accomplish that. I’m really thankful to all the people I met here for making it a good experience, especially Erin, Riley, and Stuart, and I would be thrilled to work with them again in the future! Every time I do work on prairies I like them even more.
Now it’s time for everyone to take off for the holidays. I’m looking forward to my family coming to pick me up tomorrow on the way to celebrate Christmas with relatives in Indianapolis. Working for the Echinacea Project was a great way to spend my winter break and it’s given me a lot to think about going forward!
Hi again, Flog! My name is Julie Bailard, and I’m a senior at Carleton College majoring in biology with a minor in cognitive science. I am excited to be starting my second winter at the Chicago Botanic Garden, after joining Team Echinacea last year as a winter extern and working this summer as an REU field intern. I am very interested in population and community ecology, particularly in the context of conservation and ecosystem health. Much of my previous work with the Echinacea Project has centered around one broad question: How effectively do our current methods of prairie maintenance and restoration protect and promote the health of small plant populations in fragmented habitat?
Staffanson Prairie on a gorgeous August day
This winter, I will be continuing to pursue this question in a new setting: my first germination study, using rope dodder (Cuscuta glomerata) seeds that Drake Mullett collected this summer for his dissertation research on the role of parasitic and hemiparasitic plants in prairie community health. Dodder seeds are “hard” seeds, with a tough outer coat that is impervious to water, leaving the seed dormant until that outer coat is damaged. Researchers aren’t sure how dodder breaks out of this physical dormancy in nature. While certain artificial laboratory methods for scarifying seeds have successfully broken the impervious outer coat in other dodder species, none of these methods have been applied to rope dodder, and very little is known about the optimal conditions for germinating rope dodder seeds. Interestingly, one earlier study of rope dodder distribution in Ohio prairies suggested that novel population recruitment may be positively associated with a recent history of burning. With my experiment this winter, I hope to compare the success of various scarification methods in promoting rope dodder germination, in order to identify the most effective treatment for laboratory germination. If possible, I also hope to consider the results in the context of rope dodder’s natural germinating conditions, including climate, sprouting phenology, and exposure to burning.
Cuscuta glomerata (rope dodder) seeds are about the same size as a poppy seed. And so far, no one knows how to make them sprout!…And sprout is exactly what I want to make them do! So this week, I’ve been designing and setting up a germination experiment to figure out what scarification methods and climate conditions are best for making these seeds grow.
Outside of the lab, I am a clarinetist in the Carleton Orchestra and a consultant in our campus writing center. In my spare time, I also enjoy knitting, practicing T’ai Chi, and playing Muggle Quidditch.
Carleton Quidditch after a Halloween win against St. Olaf (in case you thought I was lying)
