Here is a proposal for a fun project. It involves using demography data from this (and prior) years to estimate the growth rates of each of the remnants individually. Actually, that’s basically the whole project. Action items for the next month include: reading technical manuals with specifics on implementing aster models (see the list of project publications if you want to read them for me on your own).
In other Scott-research related news, I will also try modeling fitness of various Hesperostipa spartea crosses in experimental plot 1. Just today I got a list of positions of plants found alive in 2016 — my plan in the near future is to search positions in the plot where plants were found alive in 2011 but weren’t found in 2016 to assess mortality. Keep your eyes open for another action-packed research proposal for this porcupine grass-ey project.
We began this morning at 8:30 am with most of the team heading out to observe pollinators, however no pollinators were seen because it was so cold and rainy! While the rest of the team was watching for pollinators Abby and I worked on crossing in the west unit of the Staffanson Prairie preserve as part of the compatibility experiment! When it started to rain the team gave up on pollinators but, Will, who very generously drove us to Staffanson came and helped us finish the crossing so that we didn’t have to sit out in the rain by ourselves.
Abby is worried about the aphids drowning in the rain so she retreats into her shell.
After failing to see any pollinators this morning the team went out to P1 to work on the aphid exclusion and addition experiment. Under the strict guidance of Abby, our resident aphid expert, we quickly finished adding and removing aphids from the 70 plants that are part of the experiment!
Will is waiting to start playing Catan, he is so excited.
We had plans to measure the plants in P2 in the afternoon but the cold rainy weather would have made that difficult. Stuart gave us the afternoon off to work on proposals and relax; Will, James, Lea and I decided to focus on the relaxation part and play a friendly game of Settlers of Catan. James and I consider ourselves to be experts at this game, as we have played it many times.
“I have memorized the rule book so you don’t need to read it Will” – James 2016
The game lasted a long time and Lea did a really good job of stealing all of Will’s brick cards. In the end Will narrowly beat me. I am pretty salty about the whole ordeal because I really like to win, but Will is just really good at board games I guess.
Hi everyone! This week in the lab the volunteers have been working hard to progress with the Echinacea Project! This morning Art demonstrated and explained how to use the x-ray machine to identify whether achenes have embryos inside of them or not. During the rest of the day I worked on cleaning, counting, randomizing and rechecking achenes. These are the steps the achenes must be go through before they can be x-rayed and weighed. The past two weeks have gone very smoothly and we are now on our 6th (out of 12) bag of Echinacea heads that are in the process of being cleaned. Thanks for reading! 🙂
We did phenology in the remnants and the experimental plots this morning. I think we are already past peak flowering! *sigh* It goes by so fast. In the afternoon, most of us went to P2 to do some weeding and phenologizing. Other team members caught pollinators and worked on doing crosses.
I have been looking forward to today all week, however, not because of fieldwork, but because it was wing nite at Angelina’s Restaurant in Alexandria. Many members of Team Echinacea came and ate a lot of wings, including James, who ate 4lbs of wings all by himself! James reports feeling really good about himself afterwards. Evidence below:
James “Clean Plate Club” Eckhardt
I had to take my leftovers home in a styrofoam box. In other news, Scott met his baby doppleganger at the restaurant! See picture below:
Present Scott (in foreground, at left) and Past Scott (in background, at right)
I will leave you with a video that encapsulates our dining experience:
We met a half hour early today so we could do pollinator observations during what we thought would be their peak time. We were wrong. Hardly any bees were out and about on this very windy morning. Everyone finished around 10:30 and we met down in P1 to weed the birdsfoot trefoil.
This little mouse greeted us in G3 this morning.
The lunch table was very crowded today as we had a number of special visitors. Ruth Shaw, Dan (a grad student from U of M), and Amy and Brad Dykstra all came to help out. They also brought yummy chocolates and muffins for a lunch treat.
After lunch, everyone set out different ways. Some people went GPSing and some went to catch pollinators. I got to stay back to teach Lea, Scott, Alyson, and James my special talent, aphid exclusion and addition. Last summer, I worked a lot on the aphid project so it was a lot of fun to do again! Alyson even sang to the aphids to sooth them into their new homes. Roxy saw how much fun we were having and decided to join us for awhile in P1. We found 70/100 original addition/exclusion plants, including 33/50 addition and 37/50 exclusion ones.
Here’s some aphids I found on a collection plant in P1.
Team members learning the ways of aphids.
Today I also took my first trip to the infamous bog with Alyson and James! Roxy, the bog dog, took me on a wonderful tour of the place. On our way up, we stopped to pet the goats.
Alyson trying to escape the treacherous bog waters.
Many of you may not have paid too much attention to the forecast for Kensington, Minnesota this morning, but it was a doozy. I have included a very slightly adapted version of the local forecast from this morning.
Hazardous weather statement:
Town hall forecast office precipitable water analysis.
Locally violent and drenching thunderstorms will take aim at the north-central United States into Monday night. Some communities from the eastern part of the Dakotas to Minnesota and western Wisconsin, southward to Kansas and Missouri will be in the crosshairs of damaging storms. According to local amateur meteorologist, Stuart Wagenius, low level jetstream activity may be firing thunderstorms towards Douglas County, Minnesota. The major threat of these storms will be delayed work, 10:00 AM at the latest, cloud to prairie fragment lighting and musty winds. “A few cities that will have to be on guard [to defend themselves from jets firing thunderstorms] in the afternoon and evening include [Kensington, Hoffman], Minneapolis, Omaha, Nebraska [and a few other extraneous metropolises],” AccuWeather Meteorologist Jake Sojda said.
Hour by hour forecast:
10:00 AM. Rain and gusty winds.
11:00 AM. Surprise thunderstorms possible! While monitoring phenology, Team Echinacea members are advised to take cover in their vehicles before their study site is struck by lightning.
12:00 PM. Looks like it might rain, but not enough to keep you in. Precipitable rain is 2 inches. Who knows what that means; we just like the sound of the word precipitable.
1:00 PM. Is that rain on the horizon? Anyone outdoors advised to speed up phenology data collection without losing any accuracy.
2:00 PM. That was rain on the horizon. Might as well eat lunch until the rain stops again.
3:00 PM. Slight chance of rain and cloudy. Winds gusting to over 35 mph from the east, but they’ll feel much faster than that when you have to hold a bag of flags, a visor, a pen and a clipboard with many maps.
4:00 PM. Cloudy and dank.
5:00 PM. Who knows. It doesn’t matter anymore because everyone will be working on dinner and proposals anyway.
The K-town dentists are hard at work on Laura’s wisdom teeth. Once we find some string and a door we’ll be in business.
Sunday began literally with a bang, as we had thunderstorms all throughout the night. Most of us slept pretty well, I think. Still, there were definitely some thunderclaps right over us in Kensington. Despite this, Alex, Amy, Laura and Leah woke up early in the morning to do some field work for independent projects. Leah, Amy and Alex visited some of our Northwest sites to catch pollinators. Unfortunately, the cool weather and wet conditions meant that there were a whopping zero pollinators to be caught for Leah’s project. However, she did get this pretty hilarious picture of a Melissodes (long horned bee) on a stick.
Straight muggin with a bee on a stick.
Amy had better luck, and did style persistence well into the afternoon, despite some scary looking clouds and losing a coveted sharpie.
The rest of us had more relaxed days. Lea made soup with some of our left over vegetables. James recovered from a mystery illness. Laura and I found a large beetle on the porch of Town Hall, which excreted a mystery liquid from its back when poked. It was really funny, but only because I wasn’t the one who touched the beetle. Many of us put finishing touches on our independent project proposals, and we began editing (ahem, peer reviewing) each others’. We finally followed through on our longstanding plans to have brinner ( = breakfast dinner). Amy, Lea, Laura and I made hash (no, not that hash) with onions and spotty yellow kale, an egg scramble with onions, kohlrabi greens, and Napa cabbage, and pancakes with mystery ingredients. Somehow, we still have lots of onions left — if only we put them in the pancakes! Over dinner, we talked about how to survive a tornado (hint: hide in the bathroom), among other things, and tried to convince James that he was having a fever dream. Tomorrow is back to the field for phenology and whatever else the weather allows.
The work day started at 8am, with the team scattering to different remnants to capture pollinators in action. I was at East Elk Lake Road and decided the first plant I would visit might be the beast in the road. I assessed phenology on this plant yesterday, I believe it had 7 heads, was practically in the lane, and right before the bend in Elk Lake Road that leads to KJs. This plant has flowered many times in the course of the Echinacea project, including last year- it’s current tag number 20704. I guess I figured I’d start the morning of videos with a potentially challenging plant. But when I walked down the road with my bucket, little did I know it had been mowed since yesterday morning!
RIP to this year’s heads!
After a moment of silence for the mowed plant, literally cut down in the prime of its reproductive effort, I moved on to my first video.
“Quiet, roll ’em”
Some pollinators chose to relax on my pants, instead of nearby plants, even though I told them about the Echinacea only a meter away!
No pollen here!
Meanwhile, Amy worked on her compatibility experiment and Laura collected pollinators for her project. We headed home around 11:30 although work was far from over for the day. Amy headed back out in my car to continue her work at Staffanson. Scott, Lea, Laura, and Alex all stayed a little longer to work on their various projects, and the rest of us started to work on our proposals. Alex made a wonderful dinner of carrot-ginger soup and homemade bread after which we all split ways to keep working on our proposals. At dinner we decided that tomorrow we would do something fun in Alex and perhaps even make breakfast for dinner. Overall, we had a positive and productive day of pollinators and proposals! Stay tuned for those proposals which will be on the flog sometime next week.
Flowering Milkweed found at East of Elk Lake Road.
Today was a phenology day for Team Echinacea. One of the things that I like best about phenology is that it allows you to visit a large array of fragments and encourages you to really get to know them as you work your way through the Echinacea maps Stuart has prepared and seek out plants. I went along the north west route today, a route I had never been on before. This route includes East Elk Lake Road, North North West of Landfill, Northwest of Landfill, and Around Landfill, among others. None of these sites, in my opinion are as stunning as the East Elk Lake Road. East Elk Lake Road isn’t a huge site, but there were a number of flowering Echinacea, including those being used by Leah in her independent project. East Elk Lake Road has both great scenery and a diversity of beautiful wildflowers. In particular, I thought the flowering milk weed was especially pretty.
After phenology, Team Echinacea convened for lunch as usual. Through the entire lunch I was on the edge of my seat. I had been expecting several packages delivering the materials I need for my independent study, and without them I really could not start.
I went with Gretel in the afternoon to GPS some plants at a few of the fragments, and after very very narrowly getting poison ivy, we returned to the Hjelm house. There, like brown treasure chests waiting to be cracked open, sat my boxes full of lab equipment. I skipped down the stairs leading to the Hjelm house basement (though not really because that’s crazy dangerous with boxes in your hands, and doubly so because I’m crazy uncoordinated). Anyways, I set up my lab space, didn’t fall down the stairs, and went out to P1 to help the crew there weed hawk weed.
After all this excitement (it was mostly just me), we all sat down to chocolate cake. I have no idea how Gretel found time to make this, as we had GPS-ed earlier and I don’t think I had been weeding for more than an hour. To put it simply, Gretel’s cake was crazy good, and we all appreciated it very very very much.
Leah just wishes that bees would land on a flower and not on her camera
Laura and Leah had already started their day much earlier than the rest of us to wipe the pollinators that they caught yesterday in p2 on flowers in p1 for Laura’s independent project. When the rest of the team arrived at the Hjelm House, pollinators were out and about, so most of the team went out for pollinator observations. Other members of the team worked on assessing compatibility and used the GPS. From what I gathered from stories at lunch and messages in a certain group chat, the team saw some pretty interesting things, including a mysterious rodent. After observations, team members did some weeding, resulting in an assessment of a large thistle that might be taller than Abby.
Here’s just one pile of buckthorn that was cut from a plot!
Meanwhile, I went to the bog to remove buckthorn. Since we had removed all of the buckthorn from four of my plots yesterday (HUGE thanks to Jennifer, Laura, and Leah), I only needed to remove it from one more plot. And I did it! Buckthorn was cut and herbicide was applied to the stumps so that it won’t grow back (*crosses fingers).
Abby shows us her favorite Snapchat filter with this stunning selfie
When we convened for lunch, several of us tried out various Snapchat filters and talked about which ones we like best (In case you’re wondering, my favorite is the flower crown or the dog ears). My data loggers arrived so another shout-out is in order, this time for Gretel and Will, who figured out how to put in the batteries. After lunch, we were ready to get back to work.
I went back to the bog to set up my data loggers. These measure micro-climate data like temperature and humidity. Afterwards, I joined James and Lea in p1 to catch any plants that had been missed previously. We found 11 new plants! It started to rain once we finished so we trekked back, finished some chores, and headed home.
Everyone was hungry after such a busy day, so we were excited about the risotto and salad that Lea made. We were also excited to treat ourselves to ice cream for dessert. Unfortunately I broke a spoon, but someone said it must have happened because all of that buckthorn cutting made me really strong.
