We’re interested in investigating what resources are available to Echinacea visitors and learning more about the pollen and nectar Echinacea produces. We hope to learn if the nutritional resources available differ before and after burns. In 2022, Britney House developed methods for collecting nectar from Echinacea using microcapillary tubes. Read more about her methods here.
During the summer of 2024, the team collected pollen and nectar samples from Echinacea angustifolia at 12 sites in and around Solem Township, MN. We searched for and shot the ~10 plants (or, if few were available, as many as we could find) at each site that were closest to a random point. We then bagged up to five of the heads with pollinator exclusion bags for those 10 plants. Throughout the duration of their flowering, we collected pollen from all bagged plants and nectar from five of them per site.
We removed bags from pollen/nectar plants and backup plants when they were done flowering, and we collected until a a limit was set of a cumulative 10mm of nectar from each plant. This year we also collected immature florets from each bagged head at the start of sampling.
Following some experimentation, we conducted nectar collection only in the afternoons, while pollen collection could be done any time of day. In total, we collected vials of pollen, nectar, and vials containing immature florets from 60 plants. Pollen and nectar tubes were given to Rahul Roy at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, who will be doing pollen and nectar analysis. Tubes containing immature florets were sent with Grace Hirzel at North Dakota State University in Fargo, ND for pollen grain count and size analysis.
Data entry for collection datasheets is ongoing. Pollen data entry is started and nectar data is a little over half done with the help of Emma Reineke. Emma will also be using part of this dataset for her senior thesis project at the University of Minnesota.
Scans can be found at: Dropbox/teamEchinacea2024/z.pollenNectarDataEntry/scans.
Start year: 2024
Location: Various prairie remnants around Solem Township, MN
Team members involved with this project: Summer team 2024, Rahul Roy (St. Kate’s), Emma Reineke (University of Minnesota), Jarrad Pasifrika and Grace Hirzel (North Dakota State University)
Products: pending
Funding: ENRTF
Grace Hirzel taking off a pollen excluder bag on an Echinacea angustifolia plant.
During the summer of 2024, Team Echinacea completed the second year of its ENRTF funded project to better understand how prescribed fire influences ground nesting bee habitat, food resources, and diversity. Understanding the associations between land management methods and ground nesting bees is essential for providing reccomendations to policymakers and practitioners interested in native bee conservation.
We surveyed solitary bee diversity and nesting habitat before and after prescribed fires in a subset of 30 prairie remnants and 15 prairie restorations to determine how prescribed fire affects solitary bee nesting habitat and abundance. We used emergence traps to sample the community of solitary ground nesting bees. This was complemented by detailed measures of soil and litter to characterize how prescribed burning influences the nesting habitat (read more here).
2024 REU student Zach Zarling deploys an emergence trap at a site near Hoffman, Minnesota
We deployed emergence traps at our random “burn and bee points”(BBPTs) in prairie remnants and restorations from early June to mid September. Our deployments spanned three rotations (4-6) of BBPTs and we put out a total of ~1,159 emergence traps. On reccomendation from Dr. Alex Harmon-Threatt, we also performed 10 minute “pollard walks” on deployment to estimate the number of foraging bees at each site. These foraging numbers will be compared to nesting incidence as part of Ian Roberts’ thesis project.
As of December 21st, specimens caught in this year’s deployments have been pinned, labeled, and transported from Chicago Botanic Garden to the University of Minnesota, where Zach Portman, a bee taxonomist, will identify them. Team Echinacea also collected lots of non-bee bycatch while processing specimens collected in the traps: including millipedes, flies, and even a prairie skink! To avoid wasting these specimens, we plan to categorize this bycatch into broad taxonomic groups (like Dipterans, Orthopterans, etc) and examine potential associations between our experimental treatments and general arthropod diversity across our study sites.
Pinned specimen from 2024’s emergence trapping, likely an Agapostemon virescens.
While working on pinning and processing specimens, Ian Roberts produced a poster containing analyses from the 2023 emergence trapping data to present at Entomology 2024. The poster can be viewed here. Future data analyses will feature data from both sampling years, as well as microhabitat measurments and and diversity indices.
Start year: 2023
Location: prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN.
Data collected: insect samples, counts of foraging bees
Samples or specimens collected: Pinned bees are currently being identified at University of Minnesota. Bycatch is in the freezer at Chicago Botanic Garden.
Products: poster presented at Entomology 2024 (see above for link)
During summer 2024, Team Echinacea continued to collect data on local environmental conditions in order to understand which environmental factors are associated with good habitat for ground-nesting bees. These data complement emergence trapping for our ENRTF funded research on fire’s influence on ground nesting bees habitats. We sampled local environmental conditions near randomly placed “burn and bee points” (BBPTs) in prairie remnants and restorations.
A deployed emergence trap next to a set of marking flags. Microhabitat data was sampled within a meter of these marking flags.
Unlike the 2023 season, we did not collect data on light levels at BBPTs this year. Instead, we measured soil temperature just under the surface using a digital thermometer, along with soil compaction via a penetrometer and litter depth via a meter stick.
Team Echinacea conducted microhabitat assessments for remnant prairies at rotation 4 BBPTs. Over the summer, we took microhabitat assessment measurements at a total of 241 measurments.
Start year: 2024
Location: prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN
Follow the tire tracks from the parking space at EELR north towards the crest of a hill and you will find several piles of yard waste that appear to have been dumped recently. I came across these piles on October 11th while pulling flags from summer experiments. Among the debris are many flowering stems of Echinacea purpurea.
Standing at the site, facing south. Highway 25 at the top left corner.One of a few yard waste piles!Echinacea purpurea… an unexpected site in a remnant prairie in western MN.
The Leadplant Flower Moth (Schinia lucens), is a species of special concern in Minnesota. It used to be common and have an extensive range, but now populations are few and far between. Douglas and Grant counties (our study area) are not included on its current range map. Nonetheless, REU participant Liam Poitra thought that it was possible that this moth might persist in some of the remnants in our study area. Liam planned and conducted a systematic search for the leadplant flower moth for his REU project. If Liam found enough moths to estimate populations sizes or density, then he would investigate characteristics of their habitat for his REU project. If not, then he would transition to another project. He found one individual moth and took some great photos. Details of the search are in Liam’s report.
Liam marches through Staffanson Prairie Preserve. This site was included in his systematic search for the leadplant moth.
Start year: 2023
Location: prairie remnants in Solem & Land Townships
Ants are an integral part of ecosystems, playing a role in seed dispersal, detritus removal, pest predation, and nutrient cycling. Because ants nest in the ground, they are particularly susceptible to any process that disturbs the earth and can be heavily impacted by land use practices and management decisions. Diane Roeder, at Augustana University, designed this survey to quantify ant species diversity in remnant and restored prairie patches in western MN. These sites are primarily managed by fire, a type of disturbance that has been hypothesized to impact ant species differently via mortality and/or changes in habitat structure. During the summer, Diane and members of team Echinacea sampled 45 prairie sites (30 remnant, 15 restored), deploying a total of 415 pitfall traps. Diane and her colleagues are in the process of sorting ants from other ground-dwelling invertebrates captured by the traps and will identify specimens to compare abundance, species richness, and community composition from sites under different management regimes. In addition to measuring diversity, They also deployed sentinel prey items to determine whether arthropod communities in these areas remove prey at different rates as a measure of ecosystem services provided by predatory arthropods. To do this, they set out small cages containing moth eggs and recorded the number of eggs removed. In the future, Diane hopes to compare the overall arthropod communities between these types of sites from multiple years of sampling.
Diane traveled all over our study area during her few days in Western Minnesota.
This pitfall trap was set up at a random bb point in our study area.
Start year: 2023
Location: Prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN.
In 2023, the team continued the seedling recruitment experiment begun in 2007. The original goal of the project was to determine seedling establishment and growth rates in remnant populations of Echinacea angustifolia. Seedling recruitment rates are rarely studied in the field, and this is one of the few studies tracking recruitment in the tallgrass prairie. From 2007 to 2013 in spring, Team Echinacea visited plants which had flowered in the preceding year, and they searched near these maternal plants to find any emerging seedlings. Each fall since then, the team has searched for the seedlings, then juveniles, and measured them.
This year, we visited 51 focal maternal plants at 10 prairie remnants and searched for 86 sling plants, a subset of the original 955 seedlings. We completed sling in two days: September 15th and September 18th. Like last year, team members used the demo form to collect data on the visors, and we also shot any seedlings we could find that didn’t already have a GPS point. In total, the team found 47 basal plants and 5 flowering plants!
Start year: 2007
Location: Remnants in Douglas County, MN
Sites with seedling searches in 2022: East Elk Lake Road, East Riley, KJ’s, Loeffler’s Corner, Landfill, Nessman, Riley, Steven’s Approach, South of Golf Course, Staffanson Prairie
The data were collected on a visor using the demo form. The team recorded plant status (can’t find, basal, dead this year’s leaves, dead last year’s leaves, flowering), number of rosettes, leaf count, nearest neighbors, and head count, if flowering.
Scanned datasheets are in Dropbox: ~Dropbox\remData\115_trackSeedlings\slingRefinds2023
Physical copies of datasheets and maps can be found in the “Search For Sling 2023” black binder located currently in Hjelm on the back desk.
Samples collected: NA
Team members who searched for slings in 2022: Abby Widell, Ellysa Johnson, Jan Anderson, Lindsey Paulson.
Products:
Amy Dykstra used seedling survival data from 2010 and 2011 to model population growth rates as a part of her dissertation.
During the summer of 2023, Team Echinacea embarked on an ENRTF funded mission to better understand how prescribed fires influences solitary bee nesting habitat, food resources, and diversity is critical for providing recommendations about how prescribed fire should be used to promote pollinator conservation and healthy prairie.
We surveyed solitary bee diversity and nesting habitat before and after prescribed fires in a subset of 30 prairie remnants and 15 prairie restorations to determine how prescribed fire affects solitary bee nesting habitat and abundance. We used emergence traps to investigate composition of solitary bees in prairies. This was complemented by detailed measures of soil and litter to characterize how prescribed burning influences the nesting habitat (read more here).
We deployed emergence traps at our random points (bb points) in prairie remnants and restorations in mid-June – early September. Our deployment spanned three rotations of bb points and we put out a total of ~1,238 emergence traps.
El, Luke, and Jan, 2023 pollinator crew, deploy an emergence trap at a bb point.
As of September 28, members of Team Echinacea had processed 850 vials, 122 of which contained bees. Our preliminary catch rate is 14%! These specimens were pinned and are currently at Chicago Botanic Garden, awaiting transportation to University of Minnesota where Zach Portman, a bee taxonomist, will identify them. Team Echinacea also collected lots of non-bee bycatch while processing specimens collected in the traps. Bycatch is currently stored in our freezer at Chicago Botanic Garden.
Jan pins a bee that they found while processing vials from emergence trapping!
Ian Roberts, a M.S. student with the Echinacea Project, has taken charge of the Emergence trapping project and is currently coordinating data entry. When emergence trapping resumes in the 2024 field season, we will be well set up, thanks to detailed written and videotaped protocols made by our summer 2023 pollinator team. The prtocol can be found here: “~/Dropbox/enrtf/emergenceTrapping2023/Emergence Trap Protocol.pdf”. Video instructions are located in “~/Dropbox/enrtf/emergenceTrapping2023/exampleVideos”.
Start year: 2023
Location: prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN.
For the ENRTF-funded research project investigating fire effects on ground-nesting bees, plant-pollinator interactions, and other insects within fragmented prairies, Team Echinacea sampled 45 total prairie sites (30 remnants and 15 restorations).
To obtain robust inferences, it is important to sample randomly so that our sampling effort is not biased by what we perceive to be “good” or “bad” habitat, even subconsciously. To this end, we sampled at random locations within each site. At each site, we established between 30 and 72 sampling locations with unique identifiers (four-digit bbpts, for “burning and bees sampling points”). Early in the summer, before sampling at these points began, we ground truthed the points to ensure we were not choosing in places where we could not sample at all (e.g., think a big rock, a water body, a big patch of poison ivy, a gravel road, etc.).
Jared generated a large number of random points for each site, more points than we actually intended to sample. trap. We visited these points using a high precision gps unit and evaluated whether to “keep” the points and assign them a bbpt or “reject” the point if it could not be sampled safely or effectively.
Jan, 2023 pollinator team member, ground truths bb points at Torgen.
Start year: 2023
Location: prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN
Overlaps with: ground nesting bees, fire x fragmentation, soils in remnants and restorations, floral resources in remnants and restorations, microhabitats in prairie remnants and restorations
Data collected: spatial locations of accepted bb points are in “~/Dropbox/geospatialDataBackup2023/convertedXML2023/bbptsForEnrtf”. Maps of bb points are located in “~/Dropbox/enrtf/emergenceTrapping2023”
During summer 2023, Team Echinacea Echinacea characterized local environmental conditions to better understand which environmental factors are associated with good habitat for ground-nesting bees. This microhabitat assessment complemented emergence trapping for our ENRTF funded research on fire’s influence on ground nesting bees habitats. We sampled local environmental conditions near randomly placed bbpts in remnants and restorations.
We used a light meter to quantify light availability via a measure of photosynthetically active radiation. We took PAR readings at 1 meter and at ground level ~40 cm NE of the bb point. We also used a soil penetrometer to quantify soil compaction at ~40 cm NE of the bb point.
Team Echinacea conducted microhabitat assessments for three rotations of bb points (rotations 1,2,&3) across 46 sites. Over the summer, we took microhabitat assessment measurements at a total of 1,238 bb points.
Blaire, high school participant 2023, takes a light measurement at a bb point. We were particular about position and timeframe to ensure consistent measurements.
Start year: 2023
Location: prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN
Data collected: light availability (par measurements) and Soil Compaction (psi measurements) are stored in ~Repos/bbnest/data/microhabitatDataCuration/curate2023MicrohabitatData.R
