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 seedlings juveniles were found!
Yummy meter stickMaddie’s car stands sentinel at alfSelfie from my trip to Krusmarks!Jared demonstrates searching a transect at Nice Island
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 team takes their first steps into StaffansonA thunderhead threatens our day 1 itineraryStuart surveys Hegg Lake
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!
Gael, Aaron, Kyra, and RuthLook at that progress!Hooray! Done! I’m so proud
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.
Elk lake, pretty as everIs this allowed? The right ball went in, for what it’s worthCan’t leave without one last fish pic!The summer team at our Elk Lake picnic. 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.
Smile!Or that.
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:
Maddie runs the torch in the paddocks (Spring 2025)Hulze after a fire. Pure satisfaction. Third time’s the charm! (Spring 2024)Smoky torgen burn! Not all our smoke (Spring 2024)A paddock burns behind a private property sign. Not the best time to trespass, anyway (Fall 2023)Me and Rina at my first burn ever in Dixon Prairie at CBG (Fall 2022)
Flora and Fauna:
A white Liatris aspera? (Summer 2021)A friend among foes (Summer 2023)A triple lily we found during the orchid trip! (Summer 2024)Does Abby count as fauna? Anyway, look at all those asters (et al.)! (Summer 2024)
Minnesota skies:
Ian with a canoe before sunrise (Summer 2024)A storm cloud carrying baseball-sized hail (Summer 2024)The Elk Lake house at dawn (Summer 2021)Abby stands in a just-burned paddock at sunset. I love this photo. (Fall 2023)
Shenanigans:
Lindsey proudly picks up litter (Spring 2023)Jan, Abby, Luke, and me on a weekend trip to Duluth (Summer 2023)Wyatt + Abby Prairie Gothic (Summer 2024)Mia and Allie play cards in my van (RIP) while we wait out the rain during the orchid trip. Note the donuts (Summer 2021)I inadvertently discover the site “woeth” (Summer 2024)Swany White flour and oats are strapped in! (Summer 2024)Alex enjoys a tamale during our Chicago Independent Bookstore Day outing (Spring 2023)Ian and Abby pose with our canoe setup (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!
New members of team Echinacea! This week, we moved in our newest members—goats. The goats assist in weed removal. These animals are particularly good at removing the persistent and invasive buckthorn from patches around Hjelm. They’re also great for team morale. We have also had some time with Gretel and Stuart’s dog (Blue) and cat (Teenie).
Demography and surveying Echinacea angustifolia is a long-lived perennial, but we are unsure how long they actually live. To track individual plant lifespans, we “demo” every season. This marks the 30th year of demography data for the Echinacea Project! This week, we have made good headway demo-ing and surveying the remnant prairie field sites. As a team, we have taken demography on over 300 plants in the past two days. Our high school and REU students practiced their echinacea spotting, visor usage, and GPS skills.
Pollinator projects REU interns Grace and Kyra have solidified their experimental design on their pollinator mark and recapture project. We used nets and vials to capture local honey bees as practice before we move on to bee populations in the remnants. To mark them, we placed the bees in our constructed “bee plungers”, easing them to the top of a mesh-covered tube, where we could them use paint marks to place tiny dots on their abdomens. The order and color of these dots will allow Grace and Kyra to keep track of each individual bee that they capture throughout the project.
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
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.
Yesterday Team Echinacea took the afternoon to do some transplanting in P8. We planted 4 different species: Dichanthelium leibergii, Solidago missouriensis, Bromus kalmii, and Carex bicknellii. All of these species we want to establish in P8 because seed collection is very difficult and by starting plants from plugs we hope to establish enough plants to be able to successfully collect seeds to distribute in other areas of the experimental plot. These species are of interest to prairie restorationist and could serve a basis for future projects by members of the Echinacea Project. Solidago missouriensis are a colonel species but flower infrequently making them hard to collect seed from. In the past we have had another member of team Echinacea research Dichanthelium leibergii and could be used as a great focal species to conduct a future study on pollination biology.
The transplanting yesterday also served as good experience for folks to come together and design a plot together, get experience flagging out a new plot, as well as give them good experience with planting different types of plugs in different settings. Everyone did a great job in working together and delegating tasks and got 120 plants planted in only ~90 minutes!
Planting List:
Species
# of plugs planted
Dichanthelium leibergii
40
Solidago missouriensis
20
Bromus kalmii
30
Carex bicknellii
30
Bonus Update: The robin babies are growing up and getting big enough to watch while at lunch. Soon enough they’ll be off on their own!
Today we went to the surrounding areas of P1 and P8 —Experimental Plot number 1 and Experimental Plot number 8 respectively— to take care of the weeds found in those places (birdsfoot trefoil aka Lotus corniculatus, and sweet clover aka Melilotus officinalis).
We know that invasive plants have been expanding around the remnants of prairie and that these invasive plants represent a risk for native prairie plants (Echinacea angustifolia, porcupine grass, little bluestem, big bluestem) as they compete for the remaining space and resources, but after trying for some time we have not found a herbicide that eliminates those weeds without damaging native prairie plants, therefore we choose to manually get rid of these weeds. We spent the whole morning getting rid of the invasive plants and we did enjoy it and it made us very happy to make plants happy. 🙂
Grace with a jumping spider found in P8Kyra with the painted turtleFemale painted turtle found near P1Grace with the pile of bird’s foot trefoil by P1Aaron with the longest taproot of the bird’s foot trefoil we extracted (he did)Gael surprised by the amount of bird’s foot trefoil we got rid of
This week the team went out to experimental plot one with one clear goal, locate Hesperostipa Spartea, commonly referred to as Porcupine Grass. The team divided the plots and went off and searched–rows 42-49 were excluded from data collection. With an average time of 13 minutes per row and an extraordinary performance by Gael being the team member with the most data gathered with 17 rows. While the plants were not dry enough for seed collection, they were marked for a quick trip back to gather seeds.
I am a teacher at Badger High School in Lake Geneva, WI as well as a grad student pursuing a doctorate in education from Alverno College in Milwaukee, WI.
Pronouns: She/Her
Research Interests
I’m interested in developing a high school environmental studies curriculum focused on prairie fragmentation and restoration. My goal is to learn a range of field research and data collection techniques, as well as explore the investigative questions pursued by Team Echinacea’s graduate and undergraduate researchers. I hope to use these questions as anchoring phenomena to teach core concepts in ecology and environmental science. I also plan to bring these methods back to my students at Badger High School, where we have access to a nearby prairie in a state park that could serve as a local field site for authentic, hands-on learning.
Statement
I’m a high school science teacher at my alma mater, Badger High School in Lake Geneva, WI, where I teach Biology, Anatomy & Physiology, Environmental Science, and Chemistry. I came to education through a nontraditional path—earning a degree in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from UW–Madison and conducting research in the Bacteriology Department and Carbone Cancer Center before pursuing my Master’s in Education. I’ve now completed nine years in the classroom and am currently a doctoral student in K–12 Leadership at Alverno College. My dissertation focuses on advancing science literacy equity for historically marginalized students, including those with IEPs, multilingual learners, and students experiencing economic hardship. I also coach softball, advise the environmental club, and support my family’s restaurant in a variety of roles in Delavan, WI (Fire2Fork) where my husband is a chef!
I am a rising junior majoring in biological sciences at North Carolina State University.
Pronouns: She/Her
Research Interests
I am broadly interested biological research. I enjoy investigating how living things are affected by their physical environments, and especially how climate change is impacting them.
Statement
I have lived in North Carolina my entire life, and I enjoy adventuring out and experiencing new places. In my free time I enjoy hiking, camping, observing wildlife, and cooking dishes from different cultures.
