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.
Only Paolo can take this……and give you a princess (let me know if you get the movie reference).
Next up we found some prairie buttercup (Ranunculus rhomboideus)
My camera decided to focus on one single flower.
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).
According to minnesotawildlflowers.info, this is the only lavender-colored wood sorrel in the state of Minnesota!
We saw a handful of heart-leaved Alexanders (Zizia aptera) beginning to produce their yellow umbels (or umbellets?).
This was the yellow-est one I could find!
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!
These plants really comandra my attention.
Hoary puccoon (Lithospermum canescens) was just beginning to show its Kraft mac-and-cheese-like colors.
One flower peeking out! So cute!
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…?
Cryptid or determined ecologist? Who cares, look at the coloring of this violet!
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!
Is the lack of prairie smoke a bad omen?
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!
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.
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.
Me posing with the skunk cabbage in McDonald Woods this spring!
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…
Volunteers and students cleaning way!
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!
Priti with all the boxes!
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!
Last Thursday, a group of us returned to Kensington with the hopes of a successful prescribed burn. While we were up there, Alex and I also implemented the beginning of the smoke experiment. I believe this is the first flog entry solely about the smoke experiment this year, so I will give you a little rundown of what it entails!
We know that Echinacea flowering rates increase after fire, and we also know that smoke can stimulate plant germination. Smoke has been found to increase flowering rates in a few select species (Cyrtanthus ventricosus and Watsonia fourcadei). But, we don’t know if smoke increases flowering rates for Echinacea! We also are unsure what mechanism of fire (increased light, added nutrients, chemicals in smoke) increases flowering in Echinacea. Therefore, we are applying liquid smoke treatments to both basal and flowering Echinacea plants during the fall of 2022 and measuring their reproductive output during the summer of 2023.
Our liquid smoke of choice, Wright’s Hickory. Yum.
Our smoke operation began this summer, by mapping out ~ 300 plants on the Hutchings’ property just north of the landfill. We recorded if the plant was flowering, number of heads and number of rosettes and marked the plant with a flag and a unique three-digit identifier. Throughout the summer, there were many deliberations about the methods and for this pilot study. Before leaving for Minnesota, Alex and I cleared the shelves of distilled water containers from the local Woodman’s, gathered measuring equipment from two other fellow CBG labs (thank you!) and packed up the back of the Silverado. Finally, we were ready to smoke.
The back of the truck when loading. We carried 65 gallons of water across state lines!
We had two roles during our smoke implementation, one being a “mixer”. This person would measure an accurate ratio of smoke to water to reach our desired concentrations. We have 11 smoke concentrations in our experiment: 40%, 20%, 10%, 5%, 2.5%, 1.25%, 0.625%, 0.31%, 0.16%, 0.078% and no smoke. For each plant, we are applying approximately 1 liter of liquid. This became tricky in the field, as the back of our truck was not always level surface and the wind kept trying to steal our graduated cylinders!
Look at that gradient!Me, hunched over in the back of the truck to protect our elixirs from the wind.
The second role was being the “pourer.” Gretel and Jared came out to help us pour, which was greatly appreciated! The pourer would locate the plant that received the desired treatment and pour the liter of liquid on and around the plant within a half meter diameter.
During our trip, we were able to apply smoke treatments to 110 Echinacea plants! We hope to return to Minnesota once more this year to apply another 110 treatments, this time with improved methods and efficiency. On our first day back in Illinois, Alex and I pre-filled ~60 jugs with our desired concentrations, so we are ready to pour once we return. The next question is, how long will our hands smell like Wright’s Hickory?
Mixing up the potion.Complete!
Stay tuned for more smoke-related updates in the future!
It’s been pretty busy here as we begin to wrap up the summer field season. We’ve been slowly chipping away at all the tasks that need to be completed before the end of next week. I hope you’re ready for a jam-packed flog post!!
1. Remnant echinacea harvest is done! We have harvested every single focal echinacea plant at each of our remnant sites. Now we just have P1 left…
2. Liatris harvesting has begun and is in full swing! Just like with Echinacea, Liatris has to be harvested at the exact right time – wait too long and all the heads on a stem may already have dispersed. We’ve been visiting our Liatris sites every 3-4 days to try and ensure we catch all of our focal plants right on time. We snip off the stalks and put them in a labeled L-bag.
A Liatris plant that’s ready for harvest!
3. Total demo is all done! This week we finished up our very last total demography site. Pictured here: Lindsey, Alex, and I at Hegg during what was our foggiest (but prettiest!) total demo experience.
Me and Lindsey at Hegg, Featuring Taylor the GPS in her little raincoat
Alex recording demography at another total demo site
Beautiful bottle gentians!
4. Andropogon update! Last week we collected and counted lots of remnant and pilot Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii). At each randomly selected point, we used a meter stick to count the total number of Andropogon culms within a 1m radius and then harvested all the inflorescences. Counting and harvesting can take quite a while – especially if you get a particularly dense plot like this one that Alex and I counted which contained almost 200 culms (higher than last year’s record!)
The hydra Andropogon plot in question – the more heads we cut the more seemed to appear
5. We also enjoyed a little rainy day time indoors learning how to clean Asclepias seed pods from Jared – a very fun and relaxing activity.
And here is Lindsey using the metal detector to locate nails in one of the recruitment plots. We found the nails and beat the storm – a success!
It’s been an exciting and productive week with lots done and lots more to do! Thanks for reading 🙂
It’s the first week of September and despite only four days of work (thanks to Labor Day) we’ve gotten a lot done. This week in the field we went out to find and shoot Liatris neighbors! We use the GPS to record the four closest neighbors of each focal Liatris plant, and on Friday we finished every single site! Now we just wait until they’re ready to harvest…
A bumblebee spotted visiting Liatris!
We have also been harvesting a lot of Echinacea heads and have been working our way through all the plots. Some of the things we look for to determine if a head is ready for harvest are visible or loose achenes, crisp upper leaves, and a brown stem. If a plant is ready, we snip its head off and put it in an H-bag!
Lindsey teaching me how to harvest Echinacea heads at P1
On Thursday we had a lovely dinner together and made a huge bonfire. We ended our delicious meal with 3 desserts (Alex’s chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, AND s’mores), after which we came to the very scientific conclusion that eating dessert does in fact expand your stomach.
We also made two goat visits this week!! Here they are enjoying their favorite snack (buckthorn).
I’ve had such a great first week meeting the team and being in the field! I’m so excited to be out here and am really looking forward to learning even more as the month continues. Thanks for reading!
Hello Flog-beasts! We’ve been busy here at the Echinacea project. This Tuesday we finished measuring P1, which was the final big hurdle in our quest to finish measuring. That’s right: we’ve now visited every position in our experimental plots at which we’ve found a plant in the last three years! Very exciting.
The other two big tasks we’re working on finishing is finding Liatris and harvesting Echinacea heads. We’re making great progress on both! Every few days we revisit Echinacea in our plots and in the remnants to see if they’re ready to harvest. Once we harvest the heads, we put them into an H-bag which goes into a G-bag which goes in the seed drier which goes in G-3. That reminds me of a certain song about a bog…
This summer there’s been an unprecedented amount of Liatris flowering, so it’s been a huge task to map it all. We’ve had to put in transects at certain plots because there’s just too many to surv!
Spiral staircase Liatrus!
One other thing we’ve been spending a lot of time doing is total demography. This is when we use the GPS to revisit every location where there’s been a flowering plant in the past. When we find flowering plants we also surv(ey) them. Geena, Daytona, and I had lots of fun at Hegg Lake today surving plants…and also serving looks!!
Daytona is high-visibility.Daytona’s favorite pose. Me.*Kicks you*A compass plant. Did you know the leaves of a compass plant are cold?
One thing we are all about at the Echinacea project is innovation. Which is why I am happy to share some cutting-edge creativity Geena demonstrated today by using a Capri Sun straw as a Visor stylus:
Hello all you flog-readers! We’ve had quite a fun week at the Echinacea Project, and it’s only Thursday!
This past Tuesday, we had the team social at Hjelm. The highlights of the dinner were fresh corn on the cob and S’mores- thanks, Stuart! We also finally got to see the fruits of our tree-hauling labor as we (Jared) ignited one of the bonfire piles (which we stacked less than 20 feet tall, as per regulation).
The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid!Smoldering remains.Resident clamberer and wood-pile-smusher, Alex
The team has spent a lot of time this week measuring P1, our nearest and dearest plot. We are definitely making progress! My favorite pastime during P1 measuring is catching grasshoppers and katydids, and unleashing them on other team members. We also got some help measuring today from Team Echinacea alum Riley and our favorite recurring guest star Ruth!
P1 resident biting me so bad.
One great interpersonal disagreement we must overcome at Team Echinacea is differences in opinions on field clothes. Some people are never seen outside without their wide-brimmed hat with sun flaps. A few prefer long sleeves and long pants for sun protection to avoid cuts from grass. Many enjoy t-shirts and long pants. Some even wear shorts (as I did, once, but was quickly deterred). However, I truly believe this may be a first for Team Echinacea: Geena braved P1 with no shoes! “Socks are just enough protection for me,” she told us.
Geena goes primal.
On a more bittersweet note, our beloved team member Kennedy had her second-to-last day of work today. This was Kennedy’s second summer with the team, and we loved hearing her talk about aphids, dust, goats, and her cow Ollie. Alex baked a delicious cake to commemorate Kennedy’s leaving. Thanks Kennedy for being such an awesome, sweet, kind, and funny person to work with this summer! We wish you the best of luck in South Dakota 🙂
Cake was sweet but not as sweet as Kennedy!Emma instructing Kennedy on the proper cake-cutting form. “Imagine it’s a dust-trap.”
