Poor weather conditions delayed demo this year but did not dampen our spirits! In 2019 Team Echinacea added 4031 visor records to demo and 1431 GPS points to surv. The largest effort this summer occurred at Aanenson where eight team members took demo records on over 200 flowering plants. We found flowering plants at Northwest of Landfill with tags from 1995 in situ, meaning the plants were at least several years older than most of the team. We also found non-angustifolia Echinacea invading prairie remnants Dog and Yellow Orchid Hill.

This year we performed demo and surv at 32 prairie remnants and 10 additional sites with angustifolia populations. For our smaller sites we visit every mature plant (ones which have flowered before.) At the larger sites we measure a subsample of the mature population. At every site we also perform flowering demo, where we visit plants which flowered for the first time or were not included in the subsample. We record the status of each plant we visit, its neighbors and the number of heads it produced. All flowering plants are tagged and shot in surv, and in the coming months we will use demap to reconcile the 2019 demo and surv records with each other as well as those from previous years to construct our spatial dataset of reproductive fitness in the tallgrass prairies of our study area.

Total Demo
Bill Thom’s Gate, Common Garden, Dog, East of Town Hall, Golf Course, Hegg Lake, Martinson’s Approach, Nessman, North of Golf Course, REL, RHE, RHP, RHS, RHX, RKE, RKW, Randt, Railroad Crossing Douglas County, South of Golf Course, Sign, Town Hall, Tower, Transplant Plot, West of Aanenson, Woody’s, Yellow Orchid Hill

Annual Sample
Aanenson, Around Landfill, East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, KJ’s, Krusmark’s , Loeffler’s Corner, Landfill, North of Railroad Crossing, Norwest of Landfill and North of Northwest of Landfill (lumped,) On 27, Riley, Railroad Crossing, Steven’s Approach, Staffanson Prairie

In addition to the annual collection of data, this year Erin began developing a study to investigate whether flowering return interval and isolation by distance are correlated in Echinacea.

Start year: 1995

Location: Unbroken (never tilled) remnant prairies in Douglas County, MN, located along roadsides, nature preserves, railroad right-of-ways and privately-owned land.

Overlaps with: Flowering phenology in remnants, fire and flowering at SPP, reproductive fitness in remnants, EA fire & fitness

Data: Access the most recent copies of allDemoDemo.RData and allSurv.RData at ~Dropbox\demapSupplements\demapInputFiles. Demap accepts these files and the demap team will clean and reconcile them in the demap repository. ~Dropbox\geospatialDataBackup2019 houses the raw GPS jobs while the aiisummer2019 repo houses the raw demo records.

Data related to the flowering isolation study can be found in the floiso repository (contact Erin Eichenberger for access) and in the folder ~Dropbox\floweringIsolation2019

Products: Amy Dykstra’s dissertation included matrix projection modeling using demographic data

Project “demap” merges phenological, spatial and demographic data for remnant plants

You can read more about the demographic census in the remnants, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.

As always, demo was a huge job this year. This season we added 3868 demo records and about 1539 survey records to our database. After over 20 years of this method, we are starting to get a very good idea of the demography of Echinacea in Solem Township.

So how do we do demo? When we find a new flowering Echinacea plant, we give it a tag and get its location with a survey-grade GPS (better than 6 cm precision). Then, we can revisit this plant for years to come and monitor its survival and reproduction. We’re monitoring over 10,000 plants as of 2018. With this many records, organizing demap in the future is going to be a big task!

We made some small adjustments to how we do total demo and flowering demo (we do flowering demo in every remnant now). Now, in our big plots, we only do a sample of the plants instead of total demo. Check out the updated table below (remember we did flowering demo everywhere). We still managed to shoot thousands of points, take even more demography records, and, as always, follow the colored flags!

Total Demo	BTG, Common Garden,  DOG, East of Town Hall, KJs, Krusemark, Landfill West, Loeffler Corner East, Near Town Hall, Nessman, NNWLF, NRRX,   recruit he, recruit hp, recruit hs, recruit el, recruit hw, recruit ke, recruit kw, RRX,  RRXDC, South of Golf Course, Steven’s Approach, transplant plot, Tower, Town Hall, West of Aanenson, Woody’s
Sample Demo	Aanenson, Around LF, East Riley, Hegg Lake, Elk Lake Road East, Golf Course, Landfill, Loeffler Corner, North of Golf Course, NWLF, On 27,  Riley, Staffanson,  Yellow Orchid Hill

Year started: 1996

Location: Roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and near Solem Township, Minnesota.

Overlaps with: Flowering phenology in remnants, fire and flowering at SPP

Data collected: demo records include Flowering status, number of rosettes, number of heads, neighbors within a 12 cm radius of plants found. These are all taken with PDAs that sync with an MS Access database. They are all transferred to the demap R repository in bitbucket with git version control.

GPS points shot: Points for each flowering plant this year shot mostly in SURV records, stored in surv.csv. Each location should be either associated with a loc from prior years or a point shot this year.

Products:

• Amy Dykstra’s dissertation included matrix projection modeling using demographic data
• Project “demap” merges phenological, spatial and demographic data for remnant plants

You can find out more about the demographic census in the remnants and links to previous posts regarding it on the background page for this experiment.

We tag each Echinacea plant we see flowering in our prairie remnants, and record its location using the GPS. This is useful because it allows us to revisit the same plant in future years, checking to see if it is still alive, and if so how large it is and whether or not it is flowering. This has provided us with a very rich longitudinal dataset of life histories, dating back two decades and including thousands of plants. This year, we did total demo, visiting each plant in our database, at several sites including Staffanson, Loeffler’s Corner East, Northwest of Landfill, and East Elk Lake Road. In the interest of time, we only did flowering demo (only visiting plants that flowered this year) at several sites, including Landfill, Around Landfill, and Railroad Crossing. For each plant visited, we recorded its status (e.g., basal, flowering), its number of rosettes, and any neighboring Echinacea within a 12 cm radius. This data can be used to study inter-annual variation in flowering, population dynamics, and response to fire.

Year: 1996

Location: Roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and near Solem Township, Minnesota.

Overlaps with: Flowering phenology in remnants, fire and flowering at SPP

Data collected: Flowering status, number of rosettes, number of heads, neighbors within a 12 cm radius of plants found, stored in demo2016

GPS points shot: Points for each flowering plant this year shot mostly in PHEN records, stored in surv.csv. Some points of flowering plants stored in SURV records, also in surv.csv. Each location should be either associated with a loc from prior years or a point shot this year.

Products:

• Amy Dykstra’s dissertation included matrix projection modeling using demographic data
• Project “demap” merges phenological, spatial and demographic data for remnant plants

You can find out more about the demographic census in the remnants and links to previous posts regarding it on the background page for this experiment.

We were curious about the average sizes of our various remnant populations so I did some quick calculations and created this csv. As you can see, landfill is quite large with a median of 315 individuals found per year, whereas sites like dog and mapp are tiny, with only 3 plants found per year. At dog, to the best of our knowledge, there are only 3 Echinacea to be found, so we have regularly gathered demographic info on all of them. It’s important to note that these numbers are preliminary, rough estimates. Sometimes we have to redo a site during the summer so there will be twice as many records (hence the right skewed means), most of the time we focus on only finding flowering plants, but in some years at certain sites (e.g. landfill in 2005 and 2007) we’ve attempted to find every single individual whether or not it was flowering. All that said, here are some histograms showing numbers of demography records at each site per year:

demoSizeGraphs