It has been an absolute pleasure getting to work on this project. After many weeks of hard work, I presented the final poster I made, going over the details and findings of everything we did to learn about how Liatris head count affects predation. We did find some evidence that there is an effect on predation rate based on headcount, but the evidence itself was not strong enough. We did fail to reject the null hypothesis, but that did not discourage me from thinking about other things that could have impacted the results we found. I mentioned that confounding variables such as soil richness, fires, and rainfall may have affected our results, especially given the differences found between 2021 and 2022. These confounding variables are worth looking at, making me curious to learn more about how they influence Liatris.
With that, there is so much to learn still, and it does not only apply to Liatris. Other prairie plants, such as the Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) and Milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora), are being looked at by the Echinacea Project, and there is so much to learn about them. Keep up the excellent work with what you do, and most importantly, keep learning how to protect our precious prairie ecosystems and plant species. You are their only hope!
Lastly, I enjoyed getting to know all of you and learned a lot while I was here. Conservation science has been something I have always been interested in, so having the opportunity to research prairie plants was something special. I want to thank Stuart Wagenius, in particular, for letting me intern here and learn the ways of scientific research in a professional setting. I look forward to hearing what comes next from the project, and I sincerely thank you!
Remember when I talked about only having three batches to work with for the 2022 Liatris data? That is now no longer the case. Thanks to several volunteers continuing to chip away at the remaining Liatris plants in 2022, batch four got officially completed last week. Now with the newly completed batch, I managed to update 2022’s Liatris data in the figure above. It might not be noticeable just by looking at the graph, but the slope and p-values changed quantitatively. The p-value for 2022 now sits at roughly 0.09, which is better than what we had prior (I think it was 0.16 if I remember correctly). However, that is still not as good as 2021’s data, and that data still holds the better slope between the two. Outside of adding the fourth batch, I also tweaked the graphs to be more easily read and understood. I added some color to the data points, reworded the axes, and made the linear regression line bolder for all of you to see better. Overall, these were the updates I have to share with you, but I also wanted to inform you that I have started the process of creating the final poster. Over the course of this week, I will focus primarily on completing the poster, and I hope to have it ready to go by the last week of April. I will be presenting it to you all on April 27th (subject to change), so I hope you look forward to it. It has been quite a journey for this project, but it sure has been an interesting one, to say the least.
Two large packages arrived on the doorstep of the Chicago Botanic Garden this week containing 40 (yes, 40!) brand new emergence traps! This summer, we are conducting research on the impacts of prescribed fire and fragmented patch size on ground-nesting bees. This new research is funded by ENRTF!
To make sure the emergence traps were functional, Alex and I decided to assemble one in the lab. The assembly was fairly easy, but we noticed that there were some plastic pieces that connected two fiberglass rods that may fall off or get lost easily; sounds like a job for some super glue! We also realized we will need to purchase a heavy object, like a chain, to lay around the base of the emergence trap to prevent it from flying away in the wind!
Looks like we caught someone already!Alex assembling the collection head and bottle, sans killing agent.
We have data! So far, we have seen some fascinating results from the 2022 data we worked on over the past 6-7 weeks and the 2021 data collected last year. The data shown above is still in its preliminary stages, and there is still some additional work to be done, but we can make out some things with what we got so far. First, 2022’s data is on the left, and 2021’s is on the right. Comparing the two, we did find that the predation rate, on average, was higher for the 2021 plants than those in 2022. We also created a linear regression line for both years to examine the correlation between headcount and predation rates. 2021’s data had a higher slope than 2022’s, meaning the data in 2021 had a more substantial representation of the predation rate increasing with a higher headcount than in 2022. Overall, these findings suggest that the plants in 2021 saw much more predation activity than those in 2022. With that in mind, it makes me wonder why predation rates are higher in 2021 than in 2022 and what the results would look like if we were to combine the data. This is only the beginning of our data collecting and interpretation, so I’m looking forward to learning more about the results we got and if we can reject the null hypothesis in the end. Note that the null hypothesis states no relationship between headcount and predation rate.
And hast thou pinned the pan trap bees? O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Today, Mike finished pinning all the bees that we collected in summer 2022 for the Pollinators on Roadsides (aka Yellow Pan Trap) project! We started out with seven coolers full of vials, and Mike has been diligently pinning pollinators since late September. In total, he pinned 789 insects! We are very grateful for his help.
The next step is to add informative labels to record collection date and location for each specimen. Then, we’ll send the bees to Zach Portman, the bee taxonomist at the University of Minnesota, for identification. Overall, we collected more bees than I expected based on the last three years. I’m very curious whether there are any differences in species diversity between years. Stay tuned!
year
# bees collected
# traps
# collection days
avg # bees/trap/day
2004
591
20
7
4.2
2017
552
40
7
2.0
2018
430
37
6
1.9
2019
372
38
6
1.6
2022
789
39
7
2.9
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR). The Trust Fund is a permanent fund constitutionally established by the citizens of Minnesota to assist in the protection, conservation, preservation, and enhancement of the state’s air, water, land, fish, wildlife, and other natural resources.
This semester at school (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), I have been continuing the Dust Project I was working on over the summer. From the work this summer, I had collected 64 heads of Echinacea angustifolia that were then brought down to the Twin Cities for me to continue working on. Just recently, I finished cleaning them (many lovely mornings were spent on the St. Paul Campus, I was lucky enough to have a window in front of the counter I was working at). While it felt a little weird to see the flowers after hiking through a blizzard, it was exciting to see a little bit of the results from this summer’s hard work. There was one head that decided to split down the middle, I found that intriguing. It made me wonder whether something was living in it at one point, or if something else caused it to divide! Currently the heads are being mailed down to CBG to get x-rayed, then I will start the process of counting the full achenes to see if the dust made a difference in its reproductive success.
We are so close! We are now a little over two-thirds of the way done with the third batch, and things are starting to get exciting. I want to thank those who helped with randomizing; we would not have gotten this far without your help. With that said, there are now less than 20 plants left to randomize, and we are just about ready to move on to the data entry and interpretation steps. We should have randomization wrapped up by next week, so we should hopefully have our results in by next week. After that, we will then analyze the final results and begin to construct a final poster. More details will be provided for the poster, but in the meantime, we are quite excited about the next steps once randomization is complete.
Things are movin’ and groovin’ in the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden!
Now that we’ve wrapped up remnant Echinacea, it’s time to reenter common garden territory. Ah, sweet sweet common garden, where all plants exist neatly* on a grid unlike the unruly remnants.
One of the main things we’ve been tackling is cleaning the 2022 common garden heads. There are 2,116 heads to be cleaned and we’ve already cleaned 561 (or ~27%) of them! Wow, amazing progress! The only remaining and 3 additional bags from 2020. Once those are done, we’re caught up from the backlog that COVID augmented. As for other steps in the ACE process…
Volunteers and students cleaning way!
After cleaning comes rechecking, and we’ve had students working on rechecking Echinacea heads from experimental plot 1 in 2019 and 2020. Once these have been rechecked, we’ve got scan-master volunteer Marty prepare our achenes for uploading to the ACE website!
Our volunteers have also been catching us up on counting from 2017 through 2019 to get data ready for Wyatt’s masters thesis! I won’t spoil what she’s investigating, but just know it’s a burning question that I’m stoked about!
Alex and I have also been attempting to clean up the Cheerios boxes that line our lab window. These boxes contain achenes from the past 20 years and many different experiments, all at different stages of the ACE process. Volunteers have started assembling some of the achenes into x-ray sheets for the years 2017 and 2018.
We also had Priti help us inventory boxes from 2016. We took seeds out of these boxes for our seed addition experiment, but were unsure what achenes actually remained. These seeds did not germinate, so we will put them in storage. However, we have other seeds that are still viable, so we are hoping to freeze them and put them in the seed bank here at CBG!
Priti with all the boxes!
We’re hoping to keep moving forward this spring with all steps of the ACE process, and create an efficient system for taking data off the ACE counting and classifying website!
*it would be neatly if it weren’t for those meddling rogue plants!
In fall 2022, we planted Echinacea within our study site for the seed addition experiment. In the lab, we are currently doing a germination experiment with the same batch of seeds to calculate the expected seed germination rates under ideal conditions. Following our standard germination protocol, we first treat the achenes with Florel solution and put them in a cold fridge with low light levels to mimic winter conditions. After 14 days, we transfer them to a warm, bright environment to germinate.
Jared applies FlorelGerminating EchinaceaLindsey plants Echinacea
The seeds generally don’t start to germinate until they are in the warm environment. This year, however, I checked on the seeds a few days after they went into the fridge and discovered that they were already starting to sprout! The condenser on the fridge had broken, so it was no colder than room temperature. In spite of the unusual conditions, ~80% of the seeds germinated. This is very encouraging since it means that the seeds that we planted in the fall were viable.
After fixing the fridge, we are germinating a second batch of seeds following the standard protocol so we can replicate the experiment next spring. Lindsey planted the seeds that germinated, and we plan to grow them into plugs and transplant them this summer.
One of our main goals over the past two years has been to process all of the Echinacea harvested from remnants in 2020, 2021, and 2022 to investigate the effects of prescribed fire on flowering and fitness. We harvested 1,012 heads over these three years.
year
# of heads
rem2020
299
rem2021
383
rem2022
330
For each head, the end goal is to get an accurate count of the number of achenes and the seed set, a measure of pollination success. To collect these data, we sent the Echinacea through our high-throughput seed processing system, which we call the ACE process. (The true meaning of ACE is controversial: Always Cleaning Echinacea? Accurately Counting Echinacea? Achene Chaos Extraordinaire?) The ACE process has many steps: inventory, clean, recheck, scan, count, randomize, x-ray, classify, store.
In spring 2023, we finished processing all of the remnant Echinacea from 2020, 2021, and 2022! We send a huge thank you to all the students and volunteers who put in many hours on this project over the last few years. We couldn’t have done it without you!
Luk and Sue cleanWanying and Caitlin recheckLake Forest College students recheck and scanKat scansAllen countsPriti randomizesMarty, Char, Padmini, Caroline, and Allen agree: it’s a team effort!
Jared is currently adding the achene count and seed set data to the remnant data repository on the Echinacea Project website. All achenes are currently in the dehumidifier at the Chicago Botanic Garden. After two weeks of drying, they can be stored in the seed bank.
