In 2019 Jennifer Ison tracked and sampled ground nesting bees in Exp. Plot 2 with Miyauna Incarnato, Avery Pearson and Ren Johnson from the College of Wooster. Bees were captured, refrigerated, fluorescent dyed, released and tracked to their nests. Several bee nests were located and shot with GPS Darwin. One was excavated and brought back to Wooster for study.
Job BEENESTS_20190730_DARW contains 13 points shot of nests and their surrounding plants. The job is backed up in three locations:
This summer Shea and John continued our yellow pan trap project to sample the pollinator community found along roads in our study area in Minnesota. Today volunteer Mike Humphrey pinned the last bee from this summer’s collection!
Mike with the collection; next he’ll be consolidating these with Shea’s pinning from this summer to be sent off for ID at the University of Minnesota!
Mike received a surprise on his last day of the year; volunteer Char found a desiccated bee in one of the Echinacea heads she was cleaning! Mike reports it’s different from anything else we have in the collection this year, so a seriously cool find.
A majority of the bees in our 2019 collection are unremarkable Lasioglossums that we call “small black bees,” but we also get remarkably shiny blue and green bees in our traps!
Thanks for all your hard work Mike, and we’ll see you next year!
Last Friday, I was dispatched by Stuart to find the number of plants/ achenes planted in each experimental plot, along with the number alive as of a recent year (2017-2019, based on the plot). Although records of some plots were a bit harder to come across that others, I was able to compile data from each plot (besides p10 – planted 2019 – data coming soon). This would not have been possible without the help of Gretel, so thanks GK! I have attached a small datasheet with the survival data.
In the history of the Echinacea Project, the team has sown 31,888 Echinacea viable achenes in experimental plots. There were many more sown that likely did not have a seed. Team members found 3634 seedlings from these seeds, not including Amy D’s experimental plot 3 and remnant seedling refinds. The team has planted 18,869 Echinacea seedlings in experimental plots, not including p10 – planted at West Central Area HS in 2019. Finally, 7090 Echinacea are currently alive in the experimental plots!
This is going to be a joint flog post for Sunday and Monday (mostly Sunday…).
Sunday was a travel day for me. I woke up at 5:30 am and hopped on the Amtrak train in Dearborn, Michigan and headed back to Chicago, Illinois.
While on the train I worked on revisions for my Master’s thesis and worked on a poem while I drank my coffee.
Thank you Amtrak Employee for the coffee.
When I arrived in Chicago, I had two hours to kill before my next train. So, I grabbed lunch at Chipotle and hung out in the main hall of Chicago’s Union Station.
These statues at Chicago Union Station are supposed to represent Night and Day.
While on the train from Chicago to Minneapolis, Minnesota I worked on my Master’s thesis some more.
My Amtrak trek from Dearborn, MI to Minneapolis, MN.
When I arrived in Minneapolis I had to take the Green Line to Stuart’s brother’s house. This is where I left my car while I was out of town. So, here is a thank you to him and his family for that!
No tickets or tows There went my remaining woes I am so thankful
Finally arrived in Kensington, Minnesota around 1:15 am and in bed by 2 am.
Woke up Monday and got to work with Team Echinacea after my week away! We went out to Experimental Plot 2 and took phenology data and administered our pulse/steady pollination treatments.
Julie found a toad.
After work in P2 I went out to Riley and collected seeds.
Saturday started with the three present townhallers (Erin, Julie, and myself) heading out to the field with John and Stuart in order to collect phenology data from one of our experimental plots. Jay and Riley decided to take a trip back to their undergrad institute for the weekend and Shea had prior commitments too.
Julie taking phenology measurementsPollination or just visitors? How do we assess the quality of species interactions?
Erin and I stumbled upon a mutant floret on an Echinacea. Typically the ray florets (the long pink ones people usually think of as petals) are sterile and have unforked stigma but this one has a forked stigma! Question is it receptive to pollen?
Mutant floret
Once we finished up our phenology data collection we headed back to town hall to relax. However, I decided to take a trip out to Staffanson to work on some poems and found that someone had driven through the remnant prairie!
The scene of the crime…
I have no idea who did this or why but it made me fairly disappointed. Nevertheless, I had a productive afternoon in Staffanson.
If you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll remember that we planted some seedlings here (at Echinacea Team “West” I guess) about a month and a half ago. Now, those seedlings are growing some big ol’ true leaves, and are almost ready to go in the ground!
Happy, watered seedlings!
We have ~1400 seedlings to plant in Minnesota, and more will be coming for College of Wooster. I’m currently working on putting together the master plan for putting these all in the ground. Watch out for a flog about that, because its going to be one busy, dirty day digging in the prairie
In 2018, we collected data on the timing of flowering in 333 individual plants growing in our naturally occurring prairie remnants: 119 plants at Staffanson Preserve and 214 at others remnants. Flowering began on June 20th – four days earlier than last year. The last date of flowering was on August 9th – the latest bloomer was a roadside plant that had been mowed early in the season but put up another stem later in the season. Peak flowering for the remnants we observed in 2018 was on July 9th, which again was 4 days earlier than 2017. That day there were 257 individuals flowering. The figure below was generated with R package mateable, which was was developed by Team Echinacea to visualize and analyze phenology data.
From 2014-2016, determining flowering phenology was a major focus of the summer fieldwork, with Team Echinacea tracking phenology in all plants in all of our remnant populations. Stuart began studying phenology in remnant populations in 1996, but he didn’t know that keeping track of the dates was called “phenology.” In following years, several students & interns also studied phenology in certain populations. The motivation behind this study is to understand how timing of flowering affects the reproductive opportunities and fitness of individuals in natural populations.
Start year: 1996
Location: roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and near Solem Township, MN
Amy Waananen harvested some heads in fall 2018 and is germinating seeds right now at the U of MN. She is keeping track of which plant (mom) each seedling came from. She aims to use DNA fingerprinting techniques to identify the pollen donor (dad) of each seedling to get a sense of how far pollen moves in fragmented prairie habitat.
Data collected: We identify each plant with a numbered tag affixed to the base and give each head a colored twist tie, so that each head has a unique tag/twist-tie combination, or “head ID”, under which we store all phenology data.We monitor the flowering status of all flowering plants in the remnants, visiting at least once every three days (usually every two days) until all heads were done flowering to obtain start and end dates of flowering. We managed the data in the R project ‘aiisummer2018′ and will add it to the database of previous years’ remnant phenology records. Ask Amy Waananen for more specific data regarding phenology in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.
GPS points shot: We shot GPS points at all of the plants we monitored. The locations of plants this year will be aligned with previously recorded locations, and each will be given a unique identifier (‘AKA’). We will link this year’s phenology and survey records via the headID to AKA table. Ask Amy Waananen for more specific data regarding phenology in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.
You can find more information about phenology in the remnants and links to previous flog posts regarding this experiment at the background page for the experiment.
A pallida head. Notice the white pollen, which is the only 100% sure way you can be sure a head is pallida and not angustifolia
Echinacea pallidais an Echinacea species that is not native to Minnesota, but instead ranges East of the range of E angustifolia (and SE of our research site). In the summer of 2018, we identified 96 flowering E. pallida plants with over 200 heads that were planted in a restoration at Hegg Lake WMA. Every year for the past several years, we have visited the E. pallida plants, taken phenology data, and chopped off their heads. We do this to prevent E. pallida from being a bad pollen source or sink for native E. angustifolia populations. We were able to do this early this year, as E. pallida flowers significantly earlier than E. angustifolia.
We went back to check if we missed any heads on in September and found 3. They were done flowering, but hadn’t dropped seeds. We collected those heads, and they are currently stored at CBG. We hope that we might be able to germinate them for tissue. We want to analyze the ploidy of pallida compared to angustifolia. We have sneaking suspicions that pallida may be tetraploid where angustifolia is diploid.
Start year: 2011
Location: Hegg Lake Wildlife Management Area restoration
Physical specimens: 200+ heads were cut from E. pallida plants and removed then composted. We brought three heads back with us to Chicago Botanic Garden.
Data collected: All pallida data is in demap
GPS points shot: We shot points for all flowering E. pallida plants.
Products: In Fall 2013, Aaron and Grace, externs from Carleton College, investigated hybridization potential by analyzing the phenology and seed set of Echinacea pallida and neighboring Echinacea angustifolia that Dayvis collected in summer 2013. They wrote a report of their study. Pallida counts are being somewhat incorporated into demap.
You can find more information about Echinacea pallida flowering phenology and links to previous flog posts regarding this experiment at the background page for the experiment.
