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Today I found some healthy-looking Echinacea seedlings at my experimental plot in Perch Lake WPA near Leola, SD. Here’s another picture: We finished searching for seedlings at the last site (Staffanson Prairie Preserve) on Monday. All the datasheets & maps (163 pages) are now organized in a 3-ring binder. Here are a few highlights: We found total of … In August we’ll go back and check the fate of every one of those seedlings. I hope we can find them all! Mimi, Amanda, Greg, Allegra, Daniel, Caroline, and Gretel
looking for seedlings on the scraped roadside at Riley’s site. (They didn’t find any here.) Two possible Echinacea seedlings (not counted above) were noted. We should go back to check their identity within the next week. At site NWLF we left a pin flag at focal plant #13073. At site ERI the possible Echinacea seedling was at R102 (see page 97). Help me remember to check these! We found about 500 other Echinacea plants within the circles, mostly juvenile plants and some adults (flowering and not). The roadsides at sites ER and ERI were scraped. In the area that was scraped, all the tags are gone. We did see many little Echinacea leaves peeking through the gravel, but no seedlings. In some areas the scraping was deeper and some roots of old plants were pulled out. I collected one pulled root from the S side of the road on the W half of RI; I couldn’t tell from where it was yanked. The root was huge!
With our very precise maps of plants from previous years, we will be able to identify which plants are gone and which persist. It will be a challenge though. In some dense areas we may not be able to figure it out. Stay tuned, we’ll bring the detailed maps and try to figure it all out in August, after peak flowering.
Gretel determining the identity of individual Echinacea plants
at the scraped roadside at Riley’s. The scraped gravel was piled in the ditches. Some plants in the ditches were buried and I expect that many of them will die. There will probably be a lot of weeds in and around those piles for the next few years (until the perennials take over again). Two images (above & below) of the piles of gravel deposited
in the ditch on the S side of the road at Riley’s.
Another highlight (no photos though): It was a pleasure to visit Staffanson. Gretel and I mapped the focal locations on Sunday and saw a patch of Cypripedium calceolus in flower (past prime). Almost every focal plant in the West unit (unburned) had spittlebug spittle on it. Almost none of the focal plants in the East unit (burned) had spit. We didn’t use the tripod to take photos. The camera didn’t attach well and the remotetrip feature isn’t ready yet. We’ll need to work on the tripod and practice using it. I think it holds great potential to speed up and improve our protocol. Three engineering students from Northwestern’s Engineering Design and Communication class built a specialized camera stand for the Echinacea project. Michelle Pineda, Christopher Moran, and HengJie Tan designed and built a giant tripod which we will use to improve our protocol for relocating Echinacea seedlings. I told them about the paper maps we made by hand and how last summer Ben & Christine worked out a method to flag seedlings and make maps from digital images. To avoid issues with parallax they determined that photos had to be taken from fairly high up (at least 2.9 m from the ground). Then the main problem was taking photos straight down from such a height. The hang-a-camera-from-a-pole method wasn’t stable enough (or safe). Michelle, Chris & Heng designed several scaled-down prototypes for their class project. Christine and I looked them over and then, based on our feedback and class feedback, they built this stand…
They presented the stand to their class and me on Saturday, along with a detailed report. I can’t wait to try it out! We will try it out this summer. We hope to avoid making paper maps altogether. We’ll see if it works! We searched for Echinacea seedlings in six prairie remnants last week. We found some! Over 2+ days eight of us found 57 seedlings.
Ruth and Georgiana found 5 seedlings in this circle (41 cm radius) centered on plant 12034 at Steven’s approach. We visited 87 circles. Ten of the circles were centered on random points in the remnants and the rest were centered on plants that flowered last year. The random points were all at least 1.5 m from every plants that flowered last year and within 4 m of one or more plants that flowered last year. The radii were 41 cm in 4 remnants and 50 cm in the other two. The total area searched was 51.3 square meters. We also noted that there were about a gross other Echinacea plants in these circles. Some were tagged from previous year, others not. We changed our protocol from last year and pairs differed in data they recorded and map notations. When we go back to the remaining nine sites in two weeks we should follow this protocol: we must have at least two measurements to every seedling noted on the map Also we need to get more pencils, thumbtacks, and cards with containers to hold it all. Here are some photos of us searching and photos of places where we found some seedlings…
There were eight of us searching, Amber Eule-Nashoba, Ruth Shaw, and Stuart Wagenius searched Thursday & Friday. Georgiana May searched on Thursday. Gina Quiram searched on Friday. Caroline Ridley, Amy Dykstra, and Kate B searched on Friday (after driving across South Dakota to search for seedlings there earlier in the week). [Note to SW: Kate B is KD on datasheets.] On Thursday we found one circle at SGC that was overrun by poison ivy. Lacking protection, Amber and I decided not to venture in. On Saturday I went back to the circle with neoprene gloves. I removed some poison ivy and then searched the circle. Alas, I found none.
This is the last week with Team Echinacea this summer. We still have some plants to measure in the common garden experiment and there are still some plants flowering. We’ll get this done! Our main plan this week is to visit plants in the prairie remnants to see if they are alive. Last week we made a good start, but got rained out on Friday and the previous Monday (over 3″ of rain). We’ve been to 4 remnant Echinacea populations and refound the seedlings that we identified & mapped in May or June. We have 8 remnants to visit this week. Our maps have worked quite well–we have found almost all of the locations and the majority of seedlings were still alive. We also have to map the new flowering plants in our remnants and note which old plants are flowering this year. That’s a big job and we are making progress. We won’t finish all the sites, so we’ll have to come back this fall. But I hope we can finish up all of the big sites. Assessing the survival and reproduction of Echinacea plants is important for understanding the population dynamics of these remnant populations. We want to know if the populations are growing (and perhaps expanding), holding their own, or shrinking (and perhaps heading toward local extinction). We call our visits to remnants to find and refind plants “demography,” or demo for short. We call mapping the plants surveying because we use a survey station. Click here to read our equipment list: DEMO/SURV Equipment list each person
all Survey station I’m working on improving our seedling search protocol, using perhaps photography, a physical grid, or some combination of things. Here’s a couple photos I took to test out a locating device: toothpick plus coffee stirrer plus thumbtack. The first photo is in easier short foliage conditions and has two red markers and a blue marker somewhere in the 1m diameter circle marked by the meter sticks. The second photo is in more difficult high foliage and has two red, a blue, and a white. All are visible in both pictures, but perhaps not immediately apparent. Happy hunting!
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