Since 1995, the Echinacea Project has been mapping and collecting demographic information on Echinacea angustifolia to generate long-term records detailing individual fitness in prairie remnants. In summer 2023, Team Echinacea visited 42 prairie remnants to search at 2443 locations where adult Echinacea plants had been previously mapped. We call this “total demo.” At small sites, the team took records for all adult plants found at a site (no change in total demo protocol from previous years). At larger sites, we scaled down and visited a subset of adult plants. Burning led to high flowering rates and lots of newly flowering plants entering the census, which stressed our system for total demo. This year we did not visit plants that were “not present” for the past 3+ years and we also capped total demo points at 100 per site. For example, at Landfill, we searched at 100 locations at Landfill East and 100 Locations at Landfill West.
We used stake files on our high-precision GPS units to stake to each Echinacea plant in our total demo visit list, where we recorded flowering status, number of flowering heads, number of rosettes, and near neighbors of the plant on handheld data collectors (visors).
In addition to total demo, we searched and took records for all flowering plants in our remnant sites. For flowering demo, we visited 50 sites. In summer 2023, we took 5,601 demographic records in prairie remnants (demo) and 1929 GPS records (surv). We saw a much lower flowering year following 2022, with ~1586 flowering plants total. At Landfill, there were ~262 flowering plants and at Loeffler’s corner, there were 285.
Alexa and Jak step carefully through Kjs as they search for flowering Echinacea plants. 63 plants flowered at Kjs in 2023!
We also took demo and surv data as part of our Pollen and Nectar project where we will compare characteristics of pollen and nectar in burned vs. unburned prairies. We collected demographic data at a subset of plants at several sites where we have never done demo or surv. We put out our first tags at hulze, hulzw, torges, torgen, hutche, hutchw, and koons.
This year, we put out 528 new tags which started at 28001. Two 29000 tags were accidentally created and placed in Landfill East, but those were quickly removed during our demo rechecks following completion of flowering demo and total demo.
Lindsey visits an 18 headed Echinacea plant at Steven’s Approach. This plant produced the most heads of any this year.
After revisiting a final round of recheck plants during a trip to Minnesota in mid-November, we are just getting ready to move data from aiisummer2023 into demap.
Start year: 1995
Location: Remnant prairie populations of the purple coneflower, Echinacea angustifolia, in Douglas County, MN. Sites are located between roadsides and fields, in railroad margins, on private land, and in protected natural areas.
Total demo: Bill Thom’s Gate, Common Garden, Dog, East of Town Hall, Golf Course, Martinson’s Approach, Near Pallida, Nessman, North of Golf Course, South of Golf Course, Sign, Town Hall, Tower, Transplant Plot, West of Aanenson, Woody’s, Yellow Orchid Hill, plus the recruitment plots REL, RHE, RHP, RHS, RHX, RKE, RKW
Annual sample: Aanenson, Around Landfill, East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, KJ’s, Krusemarks, Loeffler’s Corner, Landfill, North of Railroad Crossing, Northwest of Landfill and North of Northwest of Landfill (lumped), On 27, Riley, Railroad Crossing, Steven’s Approach, Staffanson Prairie
Plant status (can’t find, basal, dead this year’s leaves, dead last year’s leaves, flowering), number of rosettes, nearest neighbors, and head count, if flowering
All GPS files are found here: Dropbox/geospatialDataBackup2023
All demo and surv records are stored in the aiisummer2023 repo
The most recent copies of allDemoDemo.RData and allSurv.RData can be accessed at Dropbox/demapSupplements/demapInputFiles
Samples or specimens collected: NA
Products:
Amy Dykstra’s dissertation included matrix projection modeling using demographic data
The “demap” project is a long-term dataset that combines 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 about this experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
Many plants, including Echinacea angustifolia, flower vigorously during the summer after a prescribed burn. We’ve demonstrated that the benefits of fire for seed production, in many circumstances, are bigger than just the increase in flowering. The additional boost to seed production results from better pollination after fires compared to other times. Now we are trying to figure out what’s going on with pollination–why is it better after a fire? It might be related to pollen or nectar, which are foods for the bees that pollinate Echinacea. Here are two possibilities: 1) after a fire, plants produce more or better pollen or nectar which draws in bees from farther away, so the plants get more visits and better pollination, presumably the bees are happier with abundant & healthy food. 2) after a fire, plants produce less or lower quality pollen or nectar which means bees need to fly to more plants to get a decent meal, so the plants get more visits, and the bees are probably frustrated with skimpier meals and bad food. The third possibility is that plants produce the same quality and quantity of pollen & nectar regardless of fires.
Over the summer we systematically collected pollen and nectar from many Echinacea plants in many populations (19) over many days. Our goal is to evaluate how fires affects the quality and quantity of pollen & nectar produced by Echinacea plants. We are getting close to wrapping up data-entry for our field collection of pollen and nectar from Echinacea angustifolia. Here’s a summary of data-entry progress so far…
Each “tagCt” is the number of Echinacea plants we sampled at each site. We will keep you posted!
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
Today, while deploying emergence traps, we avenged our recently stung colleague (Ellysa Johnson). One of our randomly selected points was directly upon a hornets nest (a few are seen in this photo, but tens were present and buzzing furiously). Miraculously, neither of the crew members present were stung. Let this day mark our revenge.
Today was Harrison’s last day with us 🙁 Stuart made a prairie-inspired cake to honor his time with the project. He is returning to teach young minds about ecological research. Farewell, Harrison, and good luck!
The team also conducted floral abundance surveys. Essentially, we want to see how many plants (and what kinds) may be associated with ground-nesting bees. That requires feet on the ground to estimate abundances and identify plants.
Lastly, a battle occurred today. While the crew did demography of echinacea plants- where we record data on this year’s flowering plants- I was stung by two wasps. Luckily, Lindsey was prepared to retaliate, though it wasn’t necessary.
All in all, farewells can sting, but at least there’s cake in the end.
Grass so high Our vision fails Of flags off hiding Who knows where
Holes for hiding Insects who Like their grasses Tall and true
Today we helped dig soil cores for a “pitfall trap” project. The holes were dug near our ENRTF insect collection points and will grant greater insight on how burning prairies can affect insect population composition. The grass was pretty high, though, and we could hardly see the flags that had been placed earlier in the season! Rest assured, the holes were dug.
Also we did emergence traps. We always do emergence traps.
The pollinator team set out to recover some emergence traps (picture 1) this afternoon. While we didn’t find ground-nesting bees, which this project is centered around, we did see another pollinator while sifting through grass that extended beyond our own heads (Jan for scale; picture 2). The viceroy (Limenitis archippus; picture 3) looks incredibly similar to the monarch (Danaus plexippus), except for the black, horizontal line that cuts across their dorsal wings. We hope to see even more pollinator friends as the field season goes on!
To counter expected high temperatures, we started earlier in the morning with GPS points for the ENTRF-funded bee research project and found some cool plants. After lunch, some of the team continued to stake and shoot points, while others planted some green comet milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora) seedlings in a previously burned site. We also saw a baby Pheobe on the deck after it attempted to fledge.
One of our hard-working employees finding points with our handy dandy GPS units.Pheobe fledgling (or attemptee).Alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii) at one of our sites.
