To kick off our 2022 burn season, we conducted a prescribed burn in our eastern pilot Andropogon experimental plot on Friday, May 6. We burned the western plot in spring 2021.
After staging equipment and checking the weather with our new bluetooth-enabled Kestrel, we ignited a test fire in the NW corner of the plot. The fire looked great and out mowed break was doing its job so we proceeded with the fire. Stuart kept watch over the northern line while Alex and Trygg tended to the western edge. We allowed the fire to back downhill against the wind. After putting in a few strips to quickly widen the black, we ignited along the eastern and southern lines. The headfire quickly ran uphill. Apart from areas with discontinuous fuels along the northern edge, the burn was pretty thorough. Stuart noted that the wind was consistently southeast except for a southern push when we ignited the headfire. We agreed that lighting the headfire sooner would have been possible given conditions and the fire behavior we observed. All-in-all, a successful first burn of 2022 for the Echinacea Project. We are eager to learn how Andropogon gerardii responds to fire.
Staging equipment for the burn (Stuart’s photo)
Stuart’s view of strip fire from the NE corner (Stuart’s photo)
Jared and Trygg keeping an eye on the western break (Alex C.’s photo)
Alex C. tending to the southern break as the headfire runs uphill.
Temperature: 65 F Relative Humidity: 37 % Wind Speed: 13 mph Wind Direction: SE Ignition time: 12:03 PM End time: 12:24 PM Burn Crew: Jared, Stuart, Alex C., Trygg
The lilium project is almost wrapping up as I am approaching the end of my semester long internship. I am almost finished with processing my seed data. All the scans and x-rays of lilium ovules have been done. The only steps left are to finish counting and classifying the ovules. Counting is done to quantify the total number of ovules in the each lilium pod. Classifying is using the x-ray image to determine the number of fertilized ovules in each pod. Once I have the data for the total and full counts of each lilium pod, I will be able to obtain the seed set for each individual lilium philadelphicum. Then, I will analyze the relationship between variation in seed set and proximity in nearest neighboring plants. Jared showed me the FNN package in R which, like its name, will find the nearest neighbor between x and y coordinates. The knn.dist function is a handy tool that allows you to compare distances of a point and its nth neighbors. In order to further analyze the data, my first step is to conduct data management and organize the different variables into a data frame. This process is very useful for researchers that use R for data analysis and data visualization. Next week, I will have a data frame that includes the information necessary for the analysis and visualization of the lilium data.
For the remnants, I finished data reconciliation for all the plants at Staffanson Prairie Preserve (spp) through 2021 in demap, our repository for data from the remnants. Each summer, we use the GPS to record the positions of every flowering Echinaceaangustifolia plant within the transect at Staffanson, and we also revisit plants that flowered previously to check whether they are still alive, a process called total demo. This winter, I connected records between years so we can track the life of individual plants across the years.
Last week, I completed demo.out for Staffanson in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Demo.out makes one record for each plant that we visited each year and records whether it was living or dead, whether it flowered, and how many heads it had. This is the dataset that we can use to do longitudinal data analysis and study the demography of Echinacea plants over time. In 2020, both sides of Staffanson burned, and it had the highest flowering rate in the past 5 years – 275 plants! Of those plants, 33 flowered for the first time. In 2021, there was just one new flowering plant.
A note to future Team Echinacea members: Are you still wearing masks all the time? Are you still 3 years behind on cleaning Echinacea heads or have you caught up a little bit?
Anyway, in the summer of 2020 there were 18 heads of Echinacea pallida that were harvested. 11 of these heads were a part of Anna Meehan’s hybrid compatibility experiment. All of the pallida heads are NOT going through the ACE process; they are in the lab all together nice and neat. These 18 pallida heads will not be a part of hh2020. EXCEPT the hybrid plant head (AP-772) who will stay apart of hh.2020 since we need achene count eventually but for now it will stay here until it is dissected.
The heads are in a box labeled “Anna Meehan’s Hybrid Compatibility experiment & E. pallida heads 2020″ in the glass cabinets right as you enter the ecology lab.
The hybrid compatibility experiment would be a perfect project for a student in the lab for a few weeks. They could asses the compatibility of the hybrid with not only the E. angustifolia but also the E. pallida. The experiment is designed with backcrosses (hybrid to parent) and forward crosses (parent to hybrid don’t know if this is the right word I just made it up). The student would be able to access seed set on the hybrid, E. angustifolia, & E. pallida heads. The sample size is fairly small but this would conclude a good pilot study for further studies of the hybrid compatibilities. We also need achene count of the hybrid plant (AP-227)!
On March 5, 2022, Allie and Wyatt presented about aphids and prescribed fire at the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference (MEEC). See the poster below!
On March 5, 2022, Mia and Alex presented the Pollinators on Roadsides project at the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference (MEEC). They focused on the bee abundance results since the specimens had not been fully identified to species yet.
On Friday, grad student Amy W. paid a visit to the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden to x-ray Echinacea achenes for several of her projects including the Dust Project, interremnant crosses, and gene flow experiments. We’re thrilled to have a functional x-ray machine once again. Amy noticed lots of variation in her samples, so we’re excited to learn about seed set for these experiments!
This week I continued to make progress on cleaning and scanning for the lilium project (Figure 2). All the pods have been cleaned and we have established a scanning protocol for lilium pods. These protocols allow for others to replicate our methods in future projects with lilies.
Jared and I conducted a couple trials with x-raying the lilium seeds. We will experiment with adjusting the settings on the x-ray and after effects for the images. Further experimentation is necessary to generate high quality x-ray scans in order to classify the seeds. In the x-ray images, the seeds that contain fertilized embryos will appear bright white (Figure 1). We use this to classify which seeds contain fertilized embryos and which ones are empty. The contrast of appearance in the x-ray is due to the increase in density of the fertilized embryos.
On 18 February 2022, Amy, Jared, Mia, and Alex presented at the online Prairie Enthusiasts (TPE) conference. Posters were available online during the conference (February 15-19, 2022), and conference attendees could ask questions via the chat on the 18th. Check out the posters below!
This week I was able to clearly define the research question for the L. philadelphicum project. My research question is focused on investigating pollination and reproduction success in wood lily. Specifically, does seed set increase with the proximity of neighboring flowers. If lilies have closer proximity to neighboring flowers, then the proportion of fertilized seeds will increase as well. We will be able to test our hypothesis with the collected seed data and recorded GPS location of each individual plant. Additionally, I made progress on cleaning lilium seeds and started writing the scanning protocol. We found that using an ionizing bar will help prevent static which causes the seeds to be difficult to handle (See Fig 1).
Furthermore, I was able to create a graph representing the progress of the lilium project with the help of Alex (Fig 3). Similarly, to echinacea, the lilium project will also go through the main steps of cleaning, scanning, counting and x-raying. This graph allows us to visualize the progress being made in the ACE protocol for L. philadelphicum. Stay tuned for next week while we experiment with methods in counting and x-raying lilium seeds!
Figure 1. Sophia cleaning ilium pods with ionizing bar
