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This morning, Amy and I searched transects in Staffanson. We did random points 15, 36, 19, 5, 20, 40, 12, 28, 1, 14, 3, 37 and 27. They were 10 metre long and half meter wide transects, some of them half a kilometre apart. We found 1 plant (!) total in the transects, and 3 plants nearby. *whew*. Lotta walking… Two files: pollCompMemo06jul.txt and mimimemo070809.doc Here’s the file. Here’s Jennifer’s preliminary list of sites. She wants a total of ten sites and wants to sample from all that are asterisked. Populations for sampling Aa Lots of plans for this week! Here are some highlights. This week we will start systematic observations of Echinacea flowering phenology in the CG experiment. We want to know the first and last day of flowering for every head of every Echinacea plant in the CG. The main event early in the week will be to put a twist tie on every head that looks like it will flower. We will also put a flag near every flowering plant with its location on the flag. We have to get the locations (plant ids) correct and get it into a database. As of Sunday, four plants in the CG had started to flower, how many left to go? We will also record flowering phenology at Staffanson Prairie Preserve. We will observe many fewer plants, but it’s a long walk. Under the supervision of DR, we will spend ~1h looking for more spittle masses on Ea in the CG. Jennifer and Diedre are coming from IL this Sunday and will stay for the week. They will help set up the phenology flags. They also plan to collect tissue from plants in several remnants to do a population genetic study using microsatellites (DNA markers). Daniel and Amy will make a plan for searching for aphids and juvenile plants in remnants. Caroline will fill us in on her plans. The competition of pollinators crew (M “floral neighborhoods” J, A “bee’s knees” G, K “style” G, A “the experimenter” H, and G “pollen from the source” D) will plan and practice for their project. Here are some things they will do… GPS (maybe): Daniel & Amy. What are we going to do about that tripod? Project pollinator competition is going well, although it has had its issues, mostly involving my camera/pole/counterweight apparatus. I have chosen my plants and four sites, all roadside: Nessman, Railroad Cross, East Elk Lake Road, and Northwest of Landfill. I am surveying plants that have flowered synchronously except for Nessman where I can survey the entire population. In total, I will record data for about 26 plants and 33 heads. It was very difficult to get my camera high enough to get a 3 m radius around the plants. Hence, I will be taking multiple pictures of each plant to try to get the distances from the potential competitors to the Echinacea. I’ve done some test shots in the field, and using 1m white “x”s made previously by the kite team has helped a lot to orient myself in the photos and to see how many pixels (not “pickles” like I said to a friend on the phone) are in a meter in each picture. I shot pictures for one of my study plants at Railroad Crossing and also took field measurements for distances from one plant to the other. I repeated the measurements with ImageJ and found that there is only a 2-6% difference in the methods, so I can use them interchangeably! I’m super pumped! This makes much more sense for sites that have few surrounding plants.
A couple plants at East Elk Lake Road. Each of the Xs are uniquely marked, and the cardboard next to the plant is its tag number.
Today, Lecia and I went out to take field measurements. We measured the distances to each potential competitor and the number of florets on those competitors. We used this method for all of the plants at East Elk Lake Road and Railroad Crossing because the competitors are not as dense. But not to worry, for Nessman and Northwest of Landfill I will use the aerial photography. I counted style persistence on all of my plants except for Nessman, which Ben and I did two days ago. Neither are ready for the cameras yet, since some of the Nessman plants have yet to flower and the NWL plants are only on their second day. Stuart asked for a timeline: Thats the plan! For my independent research project, I want to assess if plants in homogeneous Echinacea populations fare better with pollinators than plants in populations mixed with introduced sweet clover, introduced thistle, and native prairie rose. To accomplish this, I will apply several methods. First, I will randomly choose flowering Echinacea plants in several of the remnant populations to study. Then, I will record the number of introduced potential competitors as well as other native plants within a certain radius of the plant by using aerial photography. To get the camera high enough above the plant, I will stand on a ladder and hold a ~4m pole with the camera on one end and a counterweight (two wooden blocks nailed together) on the other. I will take two rounds of photos for each plant- once before peak flowering and once after. I will be able to determine distances from plant to plant by placing markers at one meter and calculating the number of pixels per meter when I review the photos.
After classifying the surrounding populations to the flowering plant, I will determine the pollination success by observing the styles of the flower. When a flower receives compatible pollen, within 24 hours the style will shrivel, indicating successful pollination. I can count the number of shriveled style rows in each flower head to determine its success as a pollen receiver. I hypothesize that the flowers in closer proximity to other flowering plants will receive less successful pollen visits than Echinacea in more homogeneous populations. Hopefully, I will collect data from more than twenty plants. The plants are finally flowering, so this week I will be choosing my plants of study and start counting styles when they emerge. Here’s a list of ideas for independent or group projects that we discussed today. 1. Improve procedure for mapping seedlings in remnants. 2. Investigate new aphid biology: distribution, behavior, ant associates, et cetera. 3. Investigate biology and behavior of native bees: 4. Do “Time lapse” photography of Echinacea heads to visualize floral development. 5. Pollen collection from plants to develop identification key (with pollen collection from bees to assess generalization/specialization. 6. Quantify plant species richness in remnants, experimental plots, local preserves. 7. Map distribution of Echinacea‘s co flowering species (Thistles, sweet clover, Coreopsis) 8. Collect seed of Stipa spartea or Dalea purpurea for common garden study. 9. There are many more possibilities… The most recent Echinacea project paper was recently published in Biometrika. I posted the pdf reprint on the Echinacea resources webpage. Here’s the citation: Geyer, C., S. Wagenius, and R.G. Shaw. 2007. Aster models for life history analysis. Biometrika 94: 415-426; doi:10.1093/biomet/asm030. You can find all the Echinacea project papers on the resource page. For convenience here are direct links to three key papers about pollination: Good news for science at the Chicago Botanic Garden The Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Foundation is giving $8 million to help build a new science building. The 35,000 square-foot building will house laboratories for the Garden’s research team, classrooms, an expanded herbarium, a plant science library, and an enlarged seed banking facility. Read the detailed press release. |
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