A monarch butterfly caterpillar at the Runestone Park remnant which is abundant with milkweed, his favorite snack.
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Slow start this morning drinking water as we waited for rain to pass so we could continue shooting ENRTF GPS points (we forgot it’s raincoat). After lunch we continued with more of the same work and saw some Heliopsis helianthoides conspiring with bees.  We started early today to beat the heat but instead were greeted with a cloudy and cool morning. Right off the bat, I started the morning by continuing to take some GPS points for the ENTRF-funded bee research project. While I was enjoying taking points in a site with minimal hills… other groups did not have the same experience. Public enemy #1 (Geese) showed their true colors by showering El with some “love”.   After lunch, I learned how to take samples of the amount of light available along some of our transects using a light meter. My biggest trouble was finding all of our nails in the ground!  Lots of tasks today, one of which was sampling the amount of light available along some of our transects using a light meter!  These transects are part of our seeding experiment, and we added some lovely markers to help us spot some sprouting echinacea!  We also continued to establish new points for our upcoming emergence trap work and we saw several friends along the way.     Around 80 8th grade students from Morris Junior High came by and learned about tools used in prescribed burns, plant identification, how to develop hypotheses, and methods for finding and trapping native bees!  Meanwhile…Other members of the team established points for our ENRTF-funded pollinator project, a rare species (Teeny catus) was spotted at the Hjelm House, and we all had watermelon at the end of the day to cool off.   Welcome back to this week’s episode of “What’s Flowering at Staffanson?”, where I will report to our avid flog followers the current blooms at one of our most beloved remnant prairies. Pasqueflower (Anemone patens) is still flowering in some parts of the preserve, but most of the plants are producing fruits by now.   Next up we found some prairie buttercup (Ranunculus rhomboideus)  Jared wanted me to get a photo of Carex media, but like the photo above, my phone camera wouldn’t focus on the slender sedge (I tried, I swear!). So, picture everyone’s favorite sedge ~here~. Meanwhile, I can show you a non-blurry photo of violet wood sorrel (Oxalis violacea).  We saw a handful of heart-leaved Alexanders (Zizia aptera) beginning to produce their yellow umbels (or umbellets?).  For some hemi-parasitic representation, we saw bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata). Actually, we saw loads of Comandra, it seemed to cover large portions of Staffanson!  Hoary puccoon (Lithospermum canescens) was just beginning to show its Kraft mac-and-cheese-like colors.  Perhaps my favorite photo of the day was of prairie violet (Viola pedatifida) and its dark purple striped veins. If you look closely, you can see Jared admiring the landscape in the background. Or is it Jared…?  The true mystery of the day was the usually-abundant prairie smoke (Geum triflorum). We ventured all the way to the west end of Staffanson before we found a plant. While I appreciated the treasure hunt, I wonder why it’s a poor year for prairie smoke!  I made all of these observations of Friday, May 19th. I’m excited to return to Staffanson in a few weeks and see how the prairie has changed! Echinacea Project 2023 B.S. Botany and Environmental studies, UW-Madison, 2023 Pronouns: She/her Research Interests I am broadly interested in plant ecology, restoration ecology, and fire ecology. I am curious about plant functional traits, especially those related to fire adaptation, and intraspecific variation. Statement I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and fell in love with prairies during my undergraduate years in Madison, Wisconsin! In my spare time, I like to run, bike, do ceramics, knit, and read.  Echinacea Project 2023 Biology & Geography/GIS major, Gustavus Adolphus College ’22 Pronouns: she/her Research Interests My research interests include plant-insect interactions, the effects of fire on plant reproduction, flowering phenology and generally how human disturbance impacts prairie species. Currently, I am working on an experiment with Alex which investigates the effects of smoke on Echinacea flowering. I’m excited to gain more skills this summer in mentoring, data management and analysis, techniques like hand-crossing, and leading field crews! Statement I am from Minneapolis, MN and spent my college years in the great city of St. Peter, MN. I have been working with the Echinacea Project since last June as a research intern. In my spare time I like to read lots of books, run long distances, play board games, embark on various crafting projects, listen to concerning amounts of Taylor Swift music, and spend as much time outside as I can.  Reliable forecasts and accurate assessments of current conditions are critical for conducting prescribed burns. We are fortunate to have many weather resources. Here are the sources I use for planning and conducting prescribed burns.
Things are movin’ and groovin’ in the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden! Now that we’ve wrapped up remnant Echinacea, it’s time to reenter common garden territory. Ah, sweet sweet common garden, where all plants exist neatly* on a grid unlike the unruly remnants. One of the main things we’ve been tackling is cleaning the 2022 common garden heads. There are 2,116 heads to be cleaned and we’ve already cleaned 561 (or ~27%) of them! Wow, amazing progress! The only remaining and 3 additional bags from 2020. Once those are done, we’re caught up from the backlog that COVID augmented. As for other steps in the ACE process…  After cleaning comes rechecking, and we’ve had students working on rechecking Echinacea heads from experimental plot 1 in 2019 and 2020. Once these have been rechecked, we’ve got scan-master volunteer Marty prepare our achenes for uploading to the ACE website! Our volunteers have also been catching us up on counting from 2017 through 2019 to get data ready for Wyatt’s masters thesis! I won’t spoil what she’s investigating, but just know it’s a burning question that I’m stoked about! Alex and I have also been attempting to clean up the Cheerios boxes that line our lab window. These boxes contain achenes from the past 20 years and many different experiments, all at different stages of the ACE process. Volunteers have started assembling some of the achenes into x-ray sheets for the years 2017 and 2018. We also had Priti help us inventory boxes from 2016. We took seeds out of these boxes for our seed addition experiment, but were unsure what achenes actually remained. These seeds did not germinate, so we will put them in storage. However, we have other seeds that are still viable, so we are hoping to freeze them and put them in the seed bank here at CBG!  We’re hoping to keep moving forward this spring with all steps of the ACE process, and create an efficient system for taking data off the ACE counting and classifying website! *it would be neatly if it weren’t for those meddling rogue plants! |
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