This Friday was day 5 of our externship and we had plenty of new experiences! We started the day by learning how to cleaning a different flowering prairie plant, liatris, or rough blazing star, with Wyatt. Compared to echinacea, achenes of liatris are much easier to be separated from the chaff and the receptacle. However, the fruits of the liatris are spread by wind. So the achenes all have fluffs attached to them which is a little challenging to separate sometimes.
Cleaning liatris!
Then we participated in the echinacea project’s weekly lab meeting. We read the draft of a paper Lea had been working on and listened to lab members discussing it. It was really fun and inspiring to see the process of scientific writing and experience the lab as such a collaborative space. I learned a lot about the behind the scene processes in doing science such as designing experiments, deciding on certain sets of data to use for a given topic and different ways to present data.
Right after the lab meeting, we listened to speed talks given by ecologists working in different departments of the Garden including aquatics, remnant forests and some other natural areas. I learned a lot about the history of the Garden as well as challenges and successes in managing different ecosystems within the Garden. I was really surprised when I learned how much work went into maintaining the lake area and the shores of lakes – planting, reinforcing, cleaning algae and other unwanted aquatic plants and so on. It was a great experience listening to talks by ecologists doing hands-on restoration and conservation work here in the Garden.
We also learned the ABT format of presenting a project and all three of us tried to come up with one for our projects here. We also decided on what we’ll be doing for projects. Cassie would be looking at density and seed set in liatris, Caitlin fire and seed set in echinacea, and I would be looking at number of flower heads and seed set in liatris. We planned to do some cleaning, rechecking, scanning, counting and X-raying to get part of the data we need and then do some data analysis. With this in mind, we were much more motivated to do some more cleaning and rechecking and dive into the second week of our externship!
Caitlin (left) and Cassie (right) focused on rechecking echinacea
To experimentally test hypotheses about how much Pedicularis canadensis, a native hemiparasite, affects the demographic rates (survival, growth, and reproduction) of other species, we planted plugs of P. canadensis in the center of a circle (with a radius of 20 cm) that contains 8 species. These eight common native prairie plant species are Echinacea angustifolia, Liatris ligulistylis, Solidago speciosa, Dalea purpurea, Pediomelum argophyllum, Sporobolus heterolepis, Koeleria macrantha, and Hesperostipa spartea. For all but Echinacea, seed was collected last year from local sources. Echinacea is the focal species of other experiments and had been planted previously. Echinacea plants served as a reference point when establishing our circles and were always directly west of P.canadensis. Circles are planted in 6 rows that were randomly selected from within the existing experimental plot 10. Rows 315, 436, 443, 643, 656, and 785 were selected. Rows contain 11 circles each, starting at 1m and going to 11m, evenly distributed 1m apart.
All circles were planted on July 29th, 2021.Plants were planted as plugs. Plugs were grown by Chicago Botanic Garden production staff before being transported to Minnesota and transplanted. Pedicularis served as the treatment and had 3 factor levels (0, 1, or 2 Pedicularis plants). Treatments were randomly assigned to circles and Pedicularis were planted in the center of each circle between August 9th and 13th, 2021. Plants in the circles were measured between August 16th and 20th, 2021.Traits measured were size and reproductive status.
As summer’s vibrant greens give way to fall’s golden glow, Team Echinacea remains hard at work in western MN. A skeleton crew is diligently wrapping up the field season. Our most important task is harvesting seed from study species so that we can quantify fire effects on plant reproduction in remnant prairies. Here is a brief update on progress for our focal species:
Asclepias viridiflora: all plants harvested (~30, Jared forgot to check harvest data sheet…)
Oenothera biennis
Cirsium flodmanii
Prenanthes racemosa
Gentiana puberulenta
Just a few end of season friends enjoying the late summer sun.
In addition to wrapping up the harvest, we are beginning to make preparations for fall burns and getting materials organized to implement a seed addition experiment designed to assess fire effects on seedling emergence and survival.
Taking a break from work to enjoy an afternoon at Seven Sisters.
This morning (Wednesday), I got a bit of a late start because I made a double-batch apple crisp this morning, and the apples weren’t quite cooked yet. For the crisp, I used combination of northwest greening and haralred apples from the trees around Hjelm, and Mia and Wesley kindly helped me slice up the mountainous 8 cups of apples. When the crisp had finally cooked, I met up with Mia and Wesley, who had just finished adding stapes in p1. (check!)
Wednesday morning apple crisp
Next, Wesley and I headed out with Collins to finish up total demo at tplot and shoot a few more flowering plants at hegg in an area which is being renamed nrpal, or near pallida. Total demo is now done! (check!)
Bottle gentian at hegg
After lunch, Wesley and I tackled the remainder of the Andropogon harvest sites. Our record was a plot at kjs with 163 Andropogon culms! Andropogon harvests are now complete. (check!)
Daily Andropogon haul
In the evening, we had another bonfire, and we were joined by Stuart’s parents. The rest of the crew cooked up some fabulous breakfast burritos for dinner, crowned with Mia’s famous pickled red onions. The wind had been gusting all afternoon, and now it pitched in to help fan the flames of the bonfire, which caught rapidly. We ended the day with some delicious home-grown apple crisp!
We’ve been missing Laura, John, and Kennedy this week, but we’ve had to forge ahead without them. Today, Mia and Wesley finished rechecks while I staked random points at nice, eth, and koons for our Andropogon expedition later in the day. After staking, I met with Stuart to learn some R-Studio data wrangling skills. At lunch, Wesley reported on the Liatris pollinator observations – the team conducted 95 total observations this summer and mapped over 2,500 plants!
Wesley with the original Liatris plant: LA1
After lunch, we learned a new protocol for harvesting Andropogon gerardii (big bluestem). We visited a third of the random points at each site and counted and harvested all the Andropogon culms within one meter of the point. Jared and I collected three full bags of Andropogon at East Riley, a site which had been burned, but we didn’t find a single culm at the other sites (spp and on27).
Jared searching for Andropogon at Staffanson
After work, the Elk Lake house spent all evening cooking up a giant batch of Wesley’s peanut noodles in preparation for the bonfire tomorrow night. Mia wisely used the food processor to grate the carrots, so no fingers were lost. We doubled the recipe, so there were an awful lot of carrots!
This was my first week with the Echinacea Project, and I feel like I have big shoes to fill after all the fantastic team members earlier this summer. It’s been an eventful week, and I think I’ve seen more Liatris plants than Echinacea so far.
Laura, Alex, and Darwin flagging Liatris
This week, the team focused on completing the project to map the Liatris aspera plants at all the sites. We spent a lot of time at Koons Hill, which supposedly had only 200 plants, but we found over 600! For the first time all summer, the team had to contend with rain, but we finally finished rechecking Koons Hill today, and we revisited all the sites to pull the neon flags, which had formerly marked the Liatris plants.
Wesley, Collins, and Kennedy braving the rain
We weren’t the only ones visiting the Liatris plants. This afternoon, we spotted numerous pollinators, including several bumblebees and a monarch, which were enjoying a sweet nectar treat.
Bumblebees on LiatrisMonarch on Liatris
At the end of the day, the wasps wanted to share our sweet cantaloupe as well, but fortunately, Wesley devised a system involving a tupperware and some ice packs, which encouraged them to chill out.
On Friday we finished measuring p1! This was a big push to get it done last week and on Friday it took some expert timing and carful radar studying but we got it done.
Mia (research intern 2020-2022) and the field crew finish measuring experimental plot p1!The waterproof measuring crew
This was a massive feat for the team, and it is super exciting to have it done. There are 10,673 total positions, out of that we found 2,899 basal plants, and 81 flowering plants, we found around 3,523 staples. Thanks to Wesley’s Time Motion Study we know that we spent 198 person hours measuring p1. Below you can see our nice completed map of p1!
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
I now have some coding to do to get ready for rechecks but for now the team is having a well-deserved break from measuring p1.
I missed a day but we have made significant progress measuring in the past few days.
On Wednesday (Aug 18) we dropped the number of segments from 32 to 19 in an afternoon with 2 measuring pairs. This was Allie’s last day measuring and we very much missed her today.
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
Today (Aug 19) we missed Allie and John but not so much that we couldn’t get anything done. The opposite in fact we got 11 segments done with 2 pairs (5 people) in ~4 hours. We have 8 segments left (woo!), today was very much a penultimate day and tomorrow might be a very big day out in p1 check back tomorrow to find out how we did.
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
On Friday the team made great progress measuring, with the help of Gretel (World Record holder for fastest measurer) the team completed 16 segments in ~3 hours with 3 measuring pairs. We now have finished the 99’s both north and south and are off in the Q-gen/big batch experiment. We have a total of 33 segments left out of 141 segments so we are 77% complete! This is amazing and I expect that we will be done before the end of the week.
Lavender is completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
Today the team continued working in the 1999 experiments. The measuring in these experiments feels slow because the plants are so densely packed but we got a good chunk done today.
With 3 measuring pairs in ~3 hours we got 12 segments done. The map makes it seem like all of 99north is done but there are actually 3 segments in their that aren’t done. Tomorrow we will finish the 1999 experiment and start Big Batch/Q-Gen which is the big green chunk on the map.
Lavender is completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
