|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
          SUMARY OF THINGS THAT OCCURED BETWEEN THURSDAY 7/17 AND FRIDAY 7/18 – SEE PHOTOS FOR VISUAL AIDES 🙂
June 15th, 2025 Before lunch This morning we went out to ONTS, NICE, TOWER, GC, SGC to continue working on the capture, marking, and recapture of Agapostemon virescens (cute lil green bee). Although we tried our best the weather and the pollination state of the Echinaceas wasn’t the best, we were only able to see one new bee, and recapture one already marked bee. After the bees we came back to Hjelm to eat lunch, my sandwich was amazing! 🙂 June 15th, 2025 After lunch After lunch we split our team into three forces, Maddie S. and Gael (me) went out to outline Staffensons, Chelsea and Aaron went to finish decapitating Echinacea pallida ☠️, and Kyra, Maddie D. and Grace went to continue twist tying… or at least that was our plan IF IT WASN’T FOR THE RAIN! It started pouring outside and we had to run back to hjelm (more like drive but you get the idea) I was dripping wet. 🙁 The good thing was that thanks to the storm my car got all sparkly clean (at least from the outside) and we were able to finish counting the number of stipa seeds, so I would say we were very productive! June 16th, 2025 (Today) Before lunch This morning we went out to P01 and P08 to pull some sweet clover, it was the perfect weather for this activity, after the rain it’s always SOOOOO easy to pull it out (please don’t try to pull sweet clover when it’s dry, my hand still hurts a lil bit 🙁 ), and after that we all went to P01 to verify the stipa records. The morning activities were… wet, unfortunately I discovered a hole in the boots I was wearing and the fact that I was wearing jeans made everything more uncomfortable. June 16th, 2025 (Today) After lunch After the wet morning we went back to Hjlem to eat lunch. My lunch was really good (thanks dad). After lunch we went back to the planned activities for the afternoon from yesterday. Maddie S. and Gael (me) went out to finish marking the perimeter at Staffensons, we had to walk A LOT but it was really cool to see so many prairie plants! After that we came back to Hjelm and the team was continuing twist tying, and I had time to work on my personal project (you’ll see what I mean in a couple days 😉 ). That was it for today, keep checking the flog to see more of our shenanigans! Love you byeeee.    Since the last daily update on the 7th, Team Echinacea has been busy! Last week was the start of the mark recapture project lead by Grace and Kyra. Tallgrass prairie in Minnesota currently exists in fragmented and isolated remnants across the state. These plants suffer from inbreeding and reproductive failure due to a lack of compatible mates. Research has shown that prairie plants in these remnants still receive frequent visits from pollinators, but it is unknown if these pollinators are moving between fragmented prairie sites. Therefore, we as a team are studying the movement patterns of a common pollinator, Agapostemon virescens, using mark recapture techniques to analyze movement between isolated Echinacea angustifolia populations in prairie remnants. In order to do this Grace and Kyra have been teaching the team how to do a mark recapture pilot study where we mark Agapostemon virescens with three alternating colors of paint pens on their thorax. There has been many trials and tribulations with finding the right approach and making sure we are getting out quickly and promptly when the time is right, but we are learning and on the right track, and have the beginnings of a great data set!    An update on projects in our remnants sites is also in store. We have also been working on total demo at numerous sites. Our objectives for surveying remnant Echinacea angustifolia populations are twofold this year: Document the spatial location of each flowering plant in every remnant using a GPS unit, and Collect demographic data about the Echinacea plants in each population. Total demo gives us a valuable glimpse into the lives of non-flowering Echinacea including factors that influence survival and population growth. The team has been working hard and taking some exceptional data this year. We’ve even found a few plants with a tag in the 500’s meaning they are plants that we’re originally planted at the start of the Echinacea Project. Now those are some long-lived perennials! We’ve also been working on staking, demoing, and decapitating Echinacea pallida over at Hegg Lake. Echinacea pallida is a species of Echinacea that is not native to Minnesota. It was mistakenly introduced to our study area during a restoration of Hegg Lake WMA, and we don’t know how it may impact our local Echinacea angustifolia so we decapitate it to stop the spread. Be gone pallida!    Finally, for the experimental plot update we’ve been working on adding twist ties to flowering Echinacea heads in plot P1 to get them ready for measuring. Measuring is going to look a little different this year as we are not looking at phenology like we have done in previous years, but I will let Maddie D. discuss that in a future post! Bonus: currently writing this after being rained in for the afternoon where Gael and I (Maddie S.) were working to stake the transect at Staffanson to get ready for total demo there soon!  This morning most of the team met Jared! He gave us a really nice, knowledgeable, and interesting talk about TOTAL DEMO. We headed to tower to start our introduction to TOTAL DEMO, we as a whole found that it’s really easy (mostly because of the low number of flowers and the fact that it wasn’t 85 degrees) I think we all enjoyed not only learning more about TOTAL DEMO but also being able to do it! After doing Tower we headed to East of Town Hall to keep doing TOTAL DEMO, and were met by Shawn Papon a worker for US fish and wildlife and he happily explained to us their efforts to restore prairie remnants and how he was so excited to finally meet someone in our team! Shawn said how he has heard of us but never had the opportunity of meeting any of us! After East of Town Hall we headed back to Hjelm for lunch, and currently we all are working on independent projects while in the watch for a big storm or even hail. Not all of us are excited for hail (I am) Well that was the daily update, I hope you liked it and THERE ARE MORE TO COME SO KEEP READING! I attached some interesting pictures!     The Viola Pod experiment has been going well! Pods have been monitored consistently. The following is the data of their pod counts over the past couple weeks.
The aphid addition and exclusion experiment was started in 2011 by Katherine Muller. The original experiment included 100 plants selected from exPt01 that were each assigned to have aphids either added or excluded across multiple years. The intention is to assess the impact of the specialist herbivore Aphis Echinaceae on Echinacea fitness. In 2025, 32 of the original 100 plants were alive, 12 addition and 20 exclusion plants. Unfortunately, no aphids were found in exP01 but many aphids were found in other remnant plots this year. As soon as I can I will transfer aphids from the plants out in remnants to plants in exP01 to get this experiment on the move. 
After four years on Team Echinacea, today is my last official day with the project. As a write this from the Chicago Botanic Garden, it’s hard not to get all retrospective about it. I’ve been on the team for 1/6th of my life! But also, only for about 1/8th of the span of the Echinacea Project’s existence. Now that’s crazy. I feel so fortunate to have been with this project in so many capacities—first as a summer REU student, then a work study, a grad student, and lastly a lab manager/research assistant. My time here has profoundly shaped me as a scientist and person, and I will always be grateful. My last weeks in the field in Minnesota were at the start of June, first with just Stuart, Maddie, Maddie, and Jared, and then joined by the rest of the summer 2025 team. We got a lot done, and had fun to boot! During the first week, the Maddies, Jared, and I staked, flagged, and searched seed addition transects in the remnants. Many     After the rest of the team arrived the following Monday, we did some onboarding activities, including a visit to Staffanson and Hegg Lake. Both these sites burned this spring! This, plus the fact that we burned p1 and p8, means that p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p7, p8, and p9 all burned this year. Gee whiz! A bountiful harvest lies ahead, I suspect.    The other big activity/accomplishment from this week (at least when I was there) was flagging p1. Usually, this is an endeavor that takes at least a couple days. However, with a brief head start and Ruth’s help, the team was able to flag the entire plot in one day! We benefitted from the fact that p1 burned in the spring because old pin flags, staples, and plants were easier to find. Huzzah!    After my last day in the field, Wednesday the 18th, the team gathered at Elk Lake for a potluck and swimming. Everyone brought delicious food, from fruit to beans to pasta salads to baked goods. Sooo satiated. After some diving shenanigans, the Maddies and I headed to the last stop on my Hoffman bucket list: Bullfrogs. Bullfrogs was not hoppin’, but we still got in a couple rounds of Maddie Sadler trouncing us at pool. The next day, my dad picked me up to fish for smallmouth bass (classic) east of Sauk Centre before we headed back to the cities.     Left to right: Stuart, Maddie S, Maddie D, Kyra, Grace, Aaron, Gael, and Chelsea. Summer team not pictured: Britney, kinda Grace H, kinda Jared, kinda Ruth, kinda me, kinda others Side note – I recently acquired a bare-bones digital point-and-shoot camera and have been enjoying clicking it at people. Below are two unique reactions to realizing your photo is being taken.   Now that the recent field pics are posted, I want to leave off with some of my fav pictures/moments/memories from the last few years that may or may not have made it on the flog before. Burning:      (Fall 2022) Flora and Fauna:  (Summer 2021)    Minnesota skies:    (Summer 2021)  Shenanigans:   (Summer 2023)  (Summer 2024)      Thank you to everyone who’s made the last few years on the team such a treat. I’ll miss the prairie immensely during my upcoming stint in California, but there’s something to be said for new adventures, too. I’ll see you around! – Wyatt New members of team Echinacea!     Demography and surveying    Pollinator projects     Team Echinacea has begun the annual census of Echinacea plants. Each year we census all flowering plants at over 30 prairie sites. Each plant gets a digital census record, a flag, and a tag. Most plants already have a tag, so we don’t give them a new one. But some have lost their tag or are flowering for the first time, so they need a new tag. New tags this year are numbered starting at 30,001. Plants get neon flags and we will come back and survey them so we can make a map of the location of every plant. Once they get surveyed, we replace the neon flag. All of these efforts help build a long-term dataset about the survival and reproduction of these very long-lived plants. These plants face many challenges living in small prairie patches, but they are tough. Below is a summary of the number of census records taken so far at nine sites site rawSite demo.id 1 other 1 2 alf around landfill 11 3 cg common garden 23 4 eelr east elk lake road 19 5 lfe landfill east 118 6 lfw landfill west 99 7 lce loeffler corner east 78 8 lcw loeffler corner west 81 9 rrxx railroad crossing 36  Project Comandra umbellata: Pair Plugs The project I will be working on this summer is transplanting and growing Comandra umbellata with either its field host or with a Galium boreale plug. Today, I prepared the growing container for the plants. We leveled off the ground, drilled holes in the container, cut and placed the drainage tile, and purchased river rock, black dirt, and beach sand, which we used to fill the container. See pictures below. The next step is to decide which sites and which plants we are going to collect. Finally, we will plant the plants in the growing container and record observations about their growth.     |
  |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© 2025 The Echinacea Project - All Rights Reserved - Log in Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
