Day 3: Flagging in Yellow Orchid Road (West and East)

I got to the Hejlm house and looked at the goats and decided to name one “Douglas”!!!

The first part of the morning started off by gathering the materials needed to flag and to record data on each echinacea plant in the remnants areas. We gathered red and neon flags, zip ties, our visors, metal tags, and our flag bags. We headed out to the remnants area and listened to Jared explain to our small group on how to walk and things to look out for when we were walking around. The group and I were searching for more echinacea plants and flagging them with red flags on the North side of each plant and leaning the flag to the East. we found 44 on the East side.

After each echinacea plant was flagged the team ended up going into partners, I was with John today and we entered in data about each plant we found into our visors and recorded many characteristics and data about each one. After we then finished with a plant we changed the red flag with a neon flag marking that data was collected. After all the plants were recorded we went over to the West side. We did the same process but didn’t have enough time to finish so we just searched and added the red flags around the plot at each echinacea we found. Some interesting observations we found were “Prairie Turnips” (the green fuzzy plant) and the “Mountain Death Camas” (the white small flowering plant). The Mountain Death Camas plant is actually poisonous so luckily none of us took a chop out of that one!!!!

After the small group got back we unpacked, cleaned up and started on lunch! After lunch we listened to a presentation from Leah explaining her project she has been working on for a couple years. She talked about the phenology of the plants and some things she was going to do to sample to see the synchrony of the plants and their timings from this year compared to previous years. After we listened to Amy discuss dust, the climate change, and how it is very similar to pollen. Most of this project was just an idea and everyone tried to ask questions and give ideas to help straighten the dust idea out! Overall it will be very interesting to see how dust could effect the plants and pollen. She also wanted to sprinkle more dust on plants and less on others. After this we did some team bonding and grouped up answering questions and discussing ideas. We then went over some quick chores we each will have to help practice and keep the team in a safe environment! We did a few more tags and called it a day as some thunderstorms started to roll in!!!