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Hello all, This is the first draft of my research proposal regarding fitness and heritability in the offspring from Shona’s crosses last summer. I still have a bit more research to complete – in particular, brushing up on quantitative genetics. Nevertheless, I have enough information to go forward, and hope to get a good chunk of my measurements done by next week. -Marie Today the team accomplished a variety of projects. The morning began by searching for grasses in the common garden. A decent amount of grasses were located and the garden was resounding with choruses of “woots” shouted out when the grasses were located. The rest of the morning the team worked on individual projects. Throughout the day, Pam and I measured the Amax, transpiration, and conductance of echinacea plant leaves in the hybrid garden within the common garden. We managed to measure 42 plants before Helga (our fabulous machine) needed to take a rest and recharge until tomorrow. In the afternoon, more grasses searches were done. The team also ventured out to Hegg Lake to help Kory find echinacea plants about to flower in common garden 2 and to help Davis find flowering echinacea pallida plants. Overall the day was beautiful to be outside, and it was a very productive day! -Reina
Hi there everyone, I was an intern with the Echinacea Project last summer (2012) and worked on the remnant flowering phenology project. Over my winter term at Carleton I worked on an independent study to analyze the seed set of some of the remnant plants. After finishing dissection and x-raying the achenes (with a lot of help from the lovely volunteers in Chicago!), I created a poster which I presented at the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference in March of this year. I have attached the poster to this post. Hopefully, it explains some cool findings! Good luck with field work everybody! Hello everyone! I am Kory Kolis and am from Eau Claire Wisconsin. I am a Junior at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter Minnesota (about an hour southwest of the twin cities). I am a biology and studio art double major. Last summer I was doing biochemistry research at Gustavus examining the four proteins that make up the kinetochore of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. I am very excited to be a part of Team Echinacea this summer, and for the opportunity to work outside! Woot! This summer I plan on continuing the research done by Katie Koch and Andrew Kaul. I will be looking at the efficiency of pollinators on the Echinacea angustifolia. By doing my observations in Jennifer Ison’s common garden I hope to be able to be able to trace the pollen back to the parent plant, allowing me to see if there are any relationships between distance from the two plants and pollinator. In my free time I love making art. My favorite medium is ceramics, but above all love making sculptures. I recently put on a small show of my artwork in my school library titled “The Alchemist.” If you would like to see the link of me on the Echinacea Project home page click here. The second week of the 2013 field season for Team Echinacea was excellent. We finished searching for seedlings and found a grand total of 102 seedlings in 13 remnant populations. We laid out the main common garden experiment with over a thousand orange, blue, and lime flags to guide our walking and to enable us to identify individual plants. We also began assessing survival in the recruitment experiment. On Wednesday Ilse presented results to the team on her aster analysis of 17-year fitness records for about 600 Echinacea plants in our main common garden experiment–details to follow. Pam took out her big new photosynthesis machine for its first trial run. Storms and wetness rained us out all day Thursday and we were without power for two hours on Thursday and about 18 hours on Friday. Team members are refining their ideas for independent projects and soon will be able to make their own posts. (IT folks at the UMN said they fixed the access problems-we’ll see.) Stay tuned to read about their awesome experimental plans! You can read about some of our team-members on our their Echinacea Project webpages… Next week we aim to finish assessing survival, flag another experimental plot, measure more plants, work on independent projects, and purchase/make/organize equipment and supplies for our experiments. We are also looking forward to Amy Dykstra’s visit. She will talk about her dissertation research. We are making updates via twitter and facebook. These media have proved to be more reliable than this flog, but we hope that changes soon. See links on the Echinacea Project’s main web page. We hope to set up a venue for sharing more of our photos–stay tuned for that, but here are a few photos from this past week…
Searching for seedlings at LF (the landfill site).
An orchid (Cypripedium calceolus)
flowering at the KJ site.
The team on the porch of the Hjelm house.
First trial of the new phtosynthesis machine.
Sorting flags to reuse & recycle.
We estimated 2600 flags here to reuse. I defended my thesis on May 16th, presenting the results of my research on the hygroscopic motion of big bluestem and indian grass. I’ve attached the presentation to this post, though the presentation is a bit light on text. I’m putting together a section on my website with more text, which I’ll link when it’s ready. I drove from the Chicago Botanic Garden to our field site in western Minnesota hoping for a window of appropriate burning weather on Thursday afternoon or Friday afternoon. I also brought 297 Echinacea seedlings to plant as part of an experiment that investigates hybridization between native and non-native Echinacea. Several gallons of side-oats grama grass seed were waiting to be hand broadcast at two sites after the burn. Why burn? Here’s the quick recap of major activities.
Dwight makes sure the fire stays where it belongs
Read the gory details… 1. Packing 2. Driving to MN 3. Preparing to burn
The plot before the burn
Dwight and I began preparations for the burn. Just after noon, it looked like the fuel might dry out enough to burn and the weather forecast looked great, so I let folks know that we were going to attempt to burn in late afternoon. I should add that the fire forecast for Friday was getting worse, so that a burn was going to happen on Thursday or never (well, June or 2014). Here’s our pre-burn to do list: What to wear during a burn: 4. The burn
Amy keeps the fire from jumping the road
Brad and Amy through the smoke
A slow and thorough burn
Post burn to do list:
Some grass is still green right after the fire
5. Seeding after the burn
Much of the grass that was green right after the fire is now brown
I found this Sharpie while broadcasting side-oats grama
Next job was getting those seedlings in the ground! The forecast was for lots of rain during the upcoming week, which is great for seedlings, and for lots of rain in the afternoon, which is not so great for a person planting seedlings. I had to hurry. I was quite efficient, except that I paused to watch a pair of Trumpeter Swans at Hegg Lake WMA–another first for me in Douglas County. I got a very nice look at the birds up close and saw the shape and color of their bills–straight and all black. I didn’t hear them, so I’m not 100% positive they were trumpeters. Tundra swans apparently look similar, but I haven’t seen them up close for years. I chose a uniform location in an area that was planted with warm season grasses in 2000 for this experimental plot. I was considering mowing the area, or at least the rows to facilitate making straight rows and putting the plugs in, but I decided against it.
Setting up planting locations
7. Planting These seedlings all originate from plants that flowered at Hegg Lake last summer. Shona conducted the summer experiment and prepared the seeds for germination. Read about Shona’s project. Jill germinated the seeds this spring and measured the seedlings multiple times. Read about Jill’s project. I ended up planting one tray (~100 seedlings) on Friday before getting rained out. Planting in the light rain worked for a while, but it was slow. When it really started coming down, I bagged it.
tools of the trade
On Saturday morning I saw the pair of Trumpeters at the flooded field SW of MN27 & CR1. The nearby Canada Geese were much smaller. A black tern flew overhead. When I arrived at Hegg, I saw fresh truck tracks and what looked like a can of beer and a pair of underwear right in the middle of the parking area. They were not there the day before! Upon closer inspection I realized that it was a can of Nos energy drink, not beer. Saturday proved to be cold but not too cold. It was 54 degrees F and very windy. I wore nitrile gloves and that kept my hands warm. I planted almost twice as fast as I did when it was raining. The Bobolinks kept me entertained all morning with their bubbling songs. 8. Seeding the phenology plot Saturday 1:11 – 1:42 pm I planted ~ 2.5 gallons of seed from three collections: 9. Driving to IL
Maria’s Dichanthelium plants. Some have been exposed to cold temperatures for the past month or so.
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