Hesperostipa in exPt01 « The Echinacea Project

More Stipa

I’m about half-way through scanning Stipa seeds and organizing them for planting, and may have underestimated how many we have! I thought we’d have approximately 6 seeds per maternal plant and, if we collected from 400 maternal plants in the field, that’s 2400 seeds. Stuart picked ~2600 positions to plant in. Plenty, right? Well, after assigning positions to seeds from 208 plants, I have 214 to go. That means I underestimated the number of plants we collected from. Also, we’re averaging more like 6.4 seeds per maternal plant. Another underestimation. I think we need another 200 positions to comfortably assign all seeds to their new homes the garden. What do you think?

Giant Cribbage Board?

I am slowly moving up from the basement to rejoin the world at ground level. Thanks to Caroline for the labels – three sets of slides of co-flowering plants of E. ang. are complete. The pictures are waiting to appear online. Meanwhile, succession of the Hjelm house basement table (door) occurs. As a flowering plant replaces another on the prairie, Stipa spartea seeds have replaced the slides.
Can you see a difference between the pictures?
Wouldn’t you like to peg some Stipa and populate the board?
I think Someone (codename: drone or riddler) may offer a 6-pack to the person who fills the last seed in each hole of each styrofoam “board”. It would be more fun than chasing a chipmunk out of the Hjelm house.

locations for Stipa

I attached a map of locations in the CG where we will plant Stipa seeds. Black dots are Echinacea locations, red circles are potential Stipa locations, and blue dots are locations we will plant this year. We will plant each Stipa seed relative to an Echinacea location, maybe 10 cm South or 20 cm North. Any thoughts?

mapOfStipaInCG.pdf

Stipa spartea seed picture

Below is one of the scans of Stipa seeds collected from Douglas County. This particular set of seeds was collected from a plant at Staffenson Prairie Preserve. The seeds themselves are pointed towards the left side of the image, and extending from them are the long awns that give Stipa it’s common name (porcupine grass). At this stage, they look less like quills, though, because they have dried and started to coil (click on the picture to see it full resolution and you can actually observe the coils and lots of other neat features of the seed, like hair and a dagger tip!). Out in nature, the coiling action would allow the seeds to attach to a disperser or to drill themselves into the ground in preparation for overwintering and germinating the next spring. We’ll be scanning all of the seeds we collected (an estimated 3,000+ seeds from 431 plants), making digital measurements of seed length and width, and planting around 2,500 of them interspersed with Echinacea in the common garden.

Planting Stipa in CG

We are going to plant Stipa spartea seeds into the common garden. Here is a
file with target locations for ~2600 seeds. The seeds will be planting in ~269 batches. Here’s a list of the batches: allStipaStarts.csv Sometime before we plant, Caroline will share a photo of one of those Stipa seeds.

Field Protocol for Daniel and Amy

So, for those of you who were wondering what Team Echinacea will be doing tomorrow, here is the field protocol for the transect searches that we will be using.

Field Protocol.doc

Any questions, please let us know!

Also, we were searching for Stipa today (a prairie grass that Dr. Ridley is planning to add to the common garden), and this is the setup we used to mark the sites with the GPS:

The antenna allowed us to get about a 9 cm margin of error when using the Trimble. And yes, that is yours truly manning the antenna, ensuring that the carrier lock is not lost. We were all ready to tell the next person who asked us what it was that we were searching for nuclear waste.

Stipa spartea collection

For some time, the powers that be on the Echinacea project have thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to compare all we’ve learned from coneflower with another important native component of the prairie?” Well, this summer, study of habitat fragmentation and its ecological and evolutionary impacts broadens to include an additional species. And the winner is … Stipa spartea aka porcupine grass! The time is right now to collect the seed, which will be sown into the common garden later this summer.

Here’s a link to a page from the Bell Museum of Natural History about Stipa spartea.

Below, you will find the sampling protocol that Greg and I used to collect seeds from Staffenson Prairie this afternoon. Stuart may have thoughts to add and the strategy might change a bit as we run into the reality of different Stipa remnant populations. In addition to remnants, we will also be collecting seeds from roadside transects. Expect that challenge to be met later next week.

Protocol for sampling Stipa spartea in prairie remnants.doc