As an intern with the Echinacea Project in summer 2020, Emma Greenlee conducted fieldwork for an independent project investigating whether microhabitat characteristics differ between 1 m-radius circles where Echinacea angustifolia seedlings have emerged and survived and circles where Echinacea seedlings emerged and died. An existing, long-term Echinacea Project experiment, the seedling establishment project (“Sling” for short) provided the GPS points corresponding to the surviving and dead seedling circles used in this project. Emma collected data on microhabitat characteristics (litter depth, vegetation cover, slope, aspect, distance to roads and fields, and community composition) and the floral neighborhood. Emma visited 69 maternal sling circles containing surviving seedlings and 66 sling circles where all seedlings were dead. In winter 2020, Emma conducted data analysis in R with help from Mia and Stuart, and plans to present findings at an ecology conference in summer 2021. You will have to read the presentation below to learn preliminary results or wait for the poster.
The floral neighborhood at Staffanson Prairie Preserve
Start year: 2020
Location: Remnant prairies in Douglas and Grant County, MN
Sites: East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, East of Town Hall, KJ’s, Landfill, Loeffler’s Corner, Nessman, North of Northwest of Landfill, Northwest of Landfill, Randt, Riley, South of Golf Course, Steven’s Approach, Staffanson Prairie Preserve
Data collected: GPS files for navigating to sling circles are at Dropbox/geospatialDataBackup2020/stakeFiles2020. Microhabitat/floral neighborhood data and R scripts are available at aiisummer2020/emma2020.
Products: Emma Greenlee’s Powerpoint presentation (below); poster to come!
Description: In 2014, Alli Grecco developed and implemented a project to characterize the composition and abundance of plants that flower in 5 remnant prairie Echinacea populations. During her community surveys, Grecco identified 32 co-flowering species. This dataset will be used to describe variation in flowering communities both between and within sites over time.
Start year: 2014
Location: SPP, NWLF, EELR, ALF, NNWLF
Products: Preliminary dataset is located in Alli Grecco’s Dropbox folder. Dataset needs to be made readyR.
A quick list of flowering plants I noticed while assessing phenology in Jennifer’s experimental plot at Hegg Lake WMA on 10 July. I list only plants observed in the plot. Asclepias speciosa is flowering just outside the SE corner of the plot.
F = flowering
X = done flowering/in fruit
N = not yet
Heliopsis helianthoides F
Amorpha canescens N
Coreopsis palmata F
Rosa arkansana F
Anemone cylindrica X
Silene F
Asclepias syriaca F
Amphicarpea bracteata F
Morning glory sp F
Apocyanum F
Tragopogon F
Cirsium arvense F
Lathyrus venosus XF (almost all done flowering)
Galium boreale F
Psoralea argophylla F
Medicago sativa F
Linum sulcatum F
Carduus acanthoides F
Senecio X
Liatris N
Achillea F
Zizea X
Red field clover F
Yellow fl lactucid F
Potentiall arguta F
Desmodium F
Physalis F
Dichanthelium leibergii XF
Here’s a list of plant species that flowered within 2m of a flowering Echinacea plant that we observed last year. The list is sorted by the count of inflorescences we counted. Species in the Asteraceae are highlighted.
Here are files with presence/absence of species within the 2m floral neighborhoods fnc10mNeighborhood.csv and within 10m floral neighborhoods fnc2mNeighborhood.csv. The first is just a reorganization of FNC.csv and the second includes info from FNC.csv and from WITHIN10M.csv.
Here’s some of the work I’ve done with organizing my data. I still need to figure out how to organize it to be able to analyze it, so this is mostly just preliminary work. I have about 2 weeks to put this all together….any help/advice is appreciated because right now, the data I have is a little overwhelming. There are 3 sheets in this document. Ech Guide to Co-Fl Sp.xls
For next week, it looks like the weather should hold up for Tues and Thurs to be able to do pollinator observations. So we will need to flag the sites on Monday and have everything ready to go for Tuesday. Remember, you ALWAYS record something for each observation you make, regardless of whether or not you observed/caught a pollinator. Select No for poll. observed and No for pollinator caught if this is the case. Some things I wanted to clear up for people helping with FNC:
>If you reach 100 when counting inflorescences, stop and record >100.
>When recording the species within 10m, you will no longer put this into a memo. Instead you will always select pl A, record 0 for infl ct, and in the field of quadrants, select the fifth option called “within 10m”.
>Review the guide to co-flowering sp for how to count infl or print one up and ask me if you have questions.
>If you come across a new species that isn’t in the list of species in the form, record in the notes not only the species but also a brief description of how you counted inflorescences.
Thanks!
Here’s some of the pollinators I saw on Coreopsis near Hegg Lake. They seemed to only be pollinating Coreopsis although there were other species like Achillea, Amorpha, and Echinacea around.
I have a photo guide but I can’t upload it b/c the file is too large.
If you plan on helping with FNC, please read the documents above. It’s important that everyone counts inflorescences the same way. Thanks!
Also, for tomorrow, there are a couple of notes I thought I’d add:
>Please make a note if you see ants on the head of the plant you are observing.
>Also make a note if it is mostly cloudy.
>Try to get to your site with about 10 min to spare so you can get your supplies ready and orient yourself with the placement of the flags to avoid time spent wandering in search of flags.
>Please try to start your observation as close to 8am as possible. End at 11am. Do not start an observation if you can’t finish by 11.
>Remember that you will only be collecting styles at the end of the observation pd from now on. Clean your tweezers with your shirt in between collections.
