Oops!! I had an entry written for Tuesday, just waiting for the obligatory photograph, but somehow my title was published and nothing else was saved. So here is the delayed version of Tuesday’s events, maybe the extra hindsight will shed a different light on our activities…
We started off the morning with an hour of rechecks (Stuart and Gretel have limited the amount of time we are allowed to spend on them to limit the frustrating and demoralizing experience of looking for plant after plant and rarely finding any trace). It’s not all bad though, because among the strings of can’t finds, there is, on rare occasion, a tiny, fuzzy, triple lined leaf of echinacea peaking through the grasses (or sometimes a large and blatantly obvious one), and finding one of those is always worth a shout of joy.
Later, Maria, Gretel and I returned to the common garden to remeasure a few other plants whose measurements didn’t quite seem normal. We searched in vain for a black head someone recorded a no twist tie as being on the same head as, removed a few staples where there had been no records of staples ever being placed, and remeasured a head whose height had been recorded as 95cm (normal for pallida maybe, but not angustifolia).
In the afternoon Katherine, Jill, and Stuart took the GPS out to finish demography at On 27.
The rest of the day we spent working on independent projects. We’ve found out that our posters need to be finished by 10am next Monday so I think we all appreciated a little extra time. I spent most of my time on R again, it would probably take me less time if Stuart just told me exactly what to do, but figuring out what I can on my own is more rewarding, and this way I actually understand what I’m doing and will be able to figure out R again next time I need it. Kelly and I did spend about two or three hours trying to figure out how to show the number of flowers that had started flowering by each day, and after a few premature high fives, and one or two nudges in the right direction from Stuart we eventually produced a beautiful graph. At least it will be once Kelly changes the axis labels from accumprop and sDints and makes it so those of us who don’t know what those mean can make sense of what it means.

Working out in the common garden recently the views have been changing. Goldenrod is in full bloom along the edges and Big Blue Stem and Indian Grass have sent up tall stems (culms) and begun flowering. Some of the culms reach up above my head and I makes me wonder what it would have been like to walk through a prairie full of them.
Indian Grass- Sorghastrum nutans

Now that Team Echinacea has (finally!) finished measuring plants in CG1, we’ve started a couple of new activities. In the morning a group went into CG1 to place staples at locations where plants have not been found for the past three seasons. These staples help us to keep track of distance between plants when measuring.

In the afternoon, almost everyone went out to the North of Railroad and Railroad sites to work on demography. In brief, demography is a way to keep track of plants in the prairie remnants that Team Echinacea studies by finding and taking the GPS locations of flowering plants every year. By understanding how often plants flower and how often new plants flower for the first time, we can get a better idea of whether or not a population is stable.

As a Flog Post bonus, I’m including some haikus that I wrote yesterday morning when we were trapped indoors by the rain. I’ve written one about each Team Echinacea member’s project this year as well as several more general haikus about what we do. Enjoy!

The Echinacea Project Haikus.doc

Tuesday morning marked the end of measuring in the common garden!!!! It was slightly anticlimactic with only one and a half rows left to finish but it is still rewarding to be finished.

It was a rainy morning so we didn’t get out to the common garden until about 10:30, but we had time to pull all of the thistles between measuring and lunch. Now there will be one less prickly plant to avoid when we return to recheck missing plants and contradictory records in the next few weeks.

While the rest of us were working inside or in the common garden Katherine and Jill spent a long morning at work in the remnants performing their aphid and any survey. They made significant progress, leaving only two small sites to finish on wednesday, and found Kelly’s sunglasses that she had lost at Staffanson.

We had been planning to spend the afternoon measuring in the common garden, but since we finished earlier than expected we had the rest of the day to work on individual projects. Many of us took the opportunity to prepare abstracts for submission to the University of Minnesota for the poster session we will be presenting at on August 9th. It turns out that abstracts become more challenging to write when you are still floundering through R endeavoring to analyse your results, but as Stuart reminded us, all (or most) of the other presenters are likely to be facing the same challenges.

I haven’t been very good about taking photos recently, but while I’m on the topic of individual projects here are two photos that relate to my work. The first one is E. angustifolia and the second is E. pallida. You can see how they have a slightly different appearance.

Sunday was a much-anticipated day off for all of us in K-town. Kelly’s grandparents were in town, Lydia was off working at Mount Carmel, and Andrew spent time with his girlfriend, Kelsey, showing her around the research sites. Meanwhile, I slept in and made “bark stuff” (an addicting chocolaty dessert) to satisfy my weeklong chocolate craving. I also GRE-ed, made a concerted effort to learn more Italian verbs, and worked on some things for my research back in Maine. Although I don’t have any pictures from the day, I do have some pictures of my research sites in Maine for those who haven’t seen a heaping hunk of serpentine before. The top picture is Pine Hill, a serpentine outcrop, and the picture below it is Settlement Quarry, a granite outcrop.

Here is a link to a csv of my data sheet!
angustifoliacrossdata_2012_all_locations.csv

And also, here’s the script that I used in R.
Compatibility script.r.txt