Another crew of 6 today brought us up past 38% done measuring p1. Yeehaw!
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Small crews can make big strides! There were only 6 of us out there this morning, but we managed to crack 30% done.   Friday, 26 July, 2024, was the first day we started measuring p1 this year! Coincidentally, this was the same day we started last year. This monumental task involves visiting 10992 positions in the plot and assessing the status of the plants there (or not, in the case of plants we have not been able to find in >3 years. RIP. Presumably.) After measuring again this morning, I booted up the old progress tracker (in the cgData repo, if you ever need it) to see how we’re doing. After making some adjustments (for the colorblind out there), here’s our progress over the last two days:   Today was also RET Brittany’s last day with the field team. Brittany, you will be sorely missed, and we hope you bring a bit of the prairie to share with your students!  We’re making great progress with total demo! 18.9% done.  Big project update! For my summer project I am looking at nectar and pollen volumes in other Asteraceae plants that are non – Echinacea in burned sites versus unburned sites. This is important because pollinators depend on pollen and nectar to get the nutrients they need. A large decrease in pollinators has been found due to prairie fragmentation, and studying whether fire can help in producing a higher quantity of pollen and nectar can be shared with land managers to help create more viable resources for pollinators in their prairie restoration efforts. My two species of focus for now are Coreopsis palmata (also known as prairie coreopsis) and Helianthus pauciflorus (also known as stiff sunflower). Mid-summer coreopsis blooming is starting to come to close and so are my nectar and pollen measurements! Onto sunflowers here in the next couple weeks! Time for daily update: Total demo continues! One group of 4 and one group of 3 went out to a total of 4 different sites. These included south of golf course, north of golf course, and yellow orchid hill east and west. A few people also finished up or pollen and nectar collection on Echinacea heads. This afternoon a group went out and did e-trap collection and retrieval. We have been working on rotation 5 this week after finally polishing off rotation 4 late last week! The rest of us went and did measurements of Echinacea in one of our experimental plots (P9). Measurements included: flowering rosette count, basal rosette count, total basal leaves, height of tallest basal leaf, height of tallest cauline leaf (aka leaf on stem without a petiole), and height of head to name a few. Our plant of the day was finding a diseased Echinacea with over 360 basal leaves. To finish off the day we moved the goats to a new paddock and enjoyed some cold watermelon in the late week heat.   Total demo has commenced! Team Echinacea began to assess demography of flowering and non flowering Echinacea today! We started at tower, a site with a rich demographic history. We payed special attention to tag 9301- a plant first tagged in 1996. Many members of Team Echinacea have met this plant before. Including me last year. This year, 9301 is basal and has 4 rosettes. I hope it has many more fruitful summers in store. We’ve got 2,640 locations where we will search for Echinacea in 2024. Our work is cut out for us, but after just one morning in the field, we are already 3.75 % done!
 Today Team Echinacea continued to wrap up the pollen and nectar collection. Only a few focal plants are still in flower. Another group worked on flagging and recording demographic information for every flowering Echinacea plant in every remnant site. Some of these plants have tags dating back decades! In the experimental plots, Stuart trained team members to find and measure all Echinacea. This data will help us understand performance of E. angustifolia x pallida hybrids. Round 5 of emergence trapping started recently. The team members are now pros at deploying and retrieving the traps.  It’s heating up in western Minnesota! Temperatures and humidity were high today. In the morning, much of Team Echinacea performed the pollinator observations we learned about yesterday with Dr. Ison. These involved recording the pollinator with a camcorder, describing its activities, and attempting to ID to morphospecies level.  In the afternoon, emergence trapping crews had a great session of deployments and retrievals, while others worked on phenology in the common garden plots, and others gathered nectar. It’s exciting to see new species starting to bloom: two major species of prairie clover are just getting started, as is the wild bergamont and wild licorice.  Once everyone was back from the field, we enjoyed some ice cold watermelon and headed home. Another great day in the field! This week was a busy Monday for team Echinacea. Jennifer from College of Wooster joins us this week along with her research assistants Max and Indigo! This morning started off with round 2 of sweet clover pulling, and was promptly followed by a crash course in pollinator observations. We tried our hand in collecting species in small tubes for ID and then release. A big part of this was learning how to differentiate between flys and bees as some flies can look realllyyy close to a bee. But don’t be fooled! To round out the morning we went out in groups to collect pollen for our pollen and nectar study specifically looking at echinacea angustifolia. After lunch, half of us went and deployed another round of emergence traps while the other half went out and did nectar collection for the pollen and nectar study.  Maddie with round 2 of our sweet clover pulling bounty.  Jennifer prepping us for our crash course in pollinator observations.  Zach holding a micro-capillary tube with a whopping 7mm of nectar! This morning the whole team got together to pull as much sweet clover as we could from p01. After the drippy morning faded, we split up to collect pollen from Echinacea angustifolia at sites throughout the area. This is part of an MN ENRTF funded project to help determine the impacts of prescribed burns on pollen and nectar quantity and quality in echinacea. After lunch, some people went to retrieve and deploy emergence traps and the rest of us went to collect nectar from echinacea plants. To collect the nectar, we are using tiny glass microcap tubes carefully inserted into the florets. Overall, we had a productive day, and enjoyed the nice weather after a wet 4th!  |
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