|
|
It’s quiet in the town hall. After Kelly and Jill left on Saturday, Maria and I had the place all to ourselves. We decided to use our Sunday to make a dent in the Echinacea Project to-do list.
First, we completed seedling refinds at three small sites (NWLF, NNWLF, and SGC) and made it a third of the way through a fourth (NESS). We also completed demography rechecks at Woody’s. This entails reconciling errors from this year’s census and collecting data on plants that flowered last year.
Woody’s happens to be one of Maria’s favorite sites. Notice the joy:
Hey folks, it’s Maria. Sorry for late reporting – the post I had written earlier was lost due to internet fuss, and I didn’t have the heart to rewrite everything again. So, unfortunately, you’ll have to settle for a concise report.
And yes this time I’m writing in a text editor first before copying and pasting onto the flog.
Friday was Kelly and Jill’s last day.
In the morning we finished demo rechecks with 2 teams at Staffanson, while Kelly finished harvesting her heads.
After lunch Stuart went to K-town to pay rent and utilities, while the rest of us did our projects/ cleanup. When Stuart returned we went to Staffanson for seedling refinds. Stuart used the GPS to find and flag focal plants, and did a few sling refinds. Katherine and Kelly resolved a particularly complex circle – the plant by the road. Jill and I worked on a few simpler circles.
We celebrated the end of the day with rootbeer floats. Dinner was pizza and supper was black bean brownies, sending off Kelly and Jill with a flourish.
Photo courtesy of Katherine.
p/s 31 August is Malaysia’s National Day! Selamat Hari Kebangsaan to all fellow Malaysians 🙂
Maria here.
Woke up this morning to some rumbling thunder in the distance.
The skies looked grey, but nothing too bad. We discussed how to do all the things we had to do at Staffanson: demo rechecks, harvesting Kelly’s Echinacea heads, removing twist-ties and flags from heads/plants that Kelly won’t harvest, figuring out 6 nearest neighboring Echinacea plants to each of Kelly’s plants that was going to be harvested, and pulling up ant traps. Whew!
We did some individual project stuff from 9 to 11am. Jill finished up sorting ants. Katherine and Kelly went to NWLF and NNWLF to pull ant traps and remove twist-ties from heads. I was in CG 99 South, measuring Dichanthelium from my maternal lines experiment, and got 4 rows done before 11am.
We set off for Staffanson, all 5 of us cozy in the truck. The corn and perennial weeds greeted us happily on the dirt road leading into Staffanson. Jill went to pull up her ant traps and then helped Kelly to remove twist-ties and flags. Stuart, Katherine and I brought out Sulu (the GPS), R2D2 (the netbook), and paper datasheets, and tried to figure out how to determine the 6 nearest neighbors to Kelly’s harvest heads. We concluded that the most efficient way was to use R to determine the 6 mapped nearest neighbors, obtain the distance to the 6th neighbor, then use a reel tape to measure out the distance and search to see if there are any other nearest neighbors closer than the mapped one. We would have to do it another day.
Here’s a fancy spider Stuart found on his knee today. Photo courtesy of Katherine.
On the way back for lunch, Stuart and Kelly belabored the pros and cons of color coding the top and bottom GPS poles.
After lunch we set out for Staffanson again. Kelly worked solo to harvest heads, while the four of us split into 2 teams (1 GPS + 1 clipboard) to do demo rechecks. After a little while, it started sprinkling and we heard some distant portentous thunder, so we turned back and left Staffanson.
Back at Hjelm House, Jill and Katherine cleaned up the ant traps and went to pull ant traps at Nessman. Stuart demonstrated dissecting achenes from Echinacea heads for Kelly, so she can dissect the heads she harvested when she’s at Carleton.
Lastly, as requested by Stuart, the “Sync Your Visor” song I came up with as an alternative to “Sync, Sync, Visor Sync”:
(To the tune of “Oh My Darling Clementine”)
Sync your visor, sync your visor,
Sync your visor everytime;
Data lost and gone forever
Don’t be sorry – sync it now!
Any suggestions for improvement are much welcome.
This morning, Team Echinacea headed out to Loeffler’s Corner to work on seedling re-finds. This site was a breeze compared with the challenges posed by Riley and KJ’s. While the plants at Riley are frequently disturbed by mowing and the plants at KJ’s are so dense that they’re practically growing on top of each other, the plants at Loeffler’s Corner are nicely spread out with easily findable seedlings.
In the afternoon, everyone made good progress on individual projects. Jill and I are both trying to wrap up our research in time for our last day on Friday. Jill and Katherine are sorting through the contents of Jill’s pitfall traps and preserving the ants that they won’t have time to identify for future study. Stuart and I are working to prepare my data to be analyzed in the winter when I hope to have an independent study to work on analysis. Maria is looking for Dicanthelium plants from which she can gather pollen in order to do a pollen viability test.
Here’s a picture of a neat plant that I found at Loeffler’s Corner. I think the leaves are somehow sharing the same petiole. Pretty cool!
Ruth came this morning with Stuart and Nicholas in tow, just in time for an all-day seedling refind extravaganza. This morning we knocked out East Riley, the frequently mowed prairie remnant with densely clustered Echinacea plants. Kelly and I took on some particularly challenging plants, but were rewarded with this:
A bee digging her nest next to one of our seedlings! By the time Kelly and I finished searching our plant, the bee had made a hole as big as she was!
After a hearty lunch, we did more seedling refinds, this time at Riley. Here’s Kelly with our first plant of the afternoon.
The afternoon progressed quickly, ending with Maria, Stuart, Kelly, and I flagging plants for seedling refinds at Loeffler’s Corner– tomorrow’s project!
The last flowering plant in CG1 put out its last anthers today (August 27, 2012). It had been flowering over a week longer than any of the other plants we monitor! This marks the end of the flowering season for Team Echinacea, but we’ve still got lots of work left to do!
On Saturday, Katherine continued working with aphids–moving them about in the common garden. I (Karen) continued working on my style persistence project. I am testing style persistence as a measure of pollen limitation in perennial Helianthus species through different pollination treatments. There are some promising preliminary results: for many, when treated with compatible pollen, the styles will shrivel in 1-2 days and will persist longer when treated with incompatible pollen or restricted from pollen. The following pictures show Helianthus pauciflorus after four days with incompatible and compatible pollen, respectively.  ,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>
On Sunday, some of us took a trip to Glacial Lakes State Park for picnic lunch and 5mile hike. What a great outing!!!!
Happy Friday! Today was our fourth day “going solo” while Stuart is away in Chicago. In the morning, we finished up seedling searches at East Elk Lake Road. That’s two sites down! In the afternoon, we continued working on demography re-checks at some of the smaller sites. Basically, demography re-checks consist of fixing any errors that we might have made during the initial round of demography (i.e. one person said a plant had two heads while another said it had four), but it also allows us to go back and find basal plants that have flowered previously. By checking on these plants (or a random subset of these plants) each year, we can get a better idea of how often a plant flowers and the survival rate of flowering plants. Today we finished demography re-checks at Loeffler’s Corner (East and West) and Yellow Orchid Hill.
Here’s a picture of the crew at Yellow Orchid Hill after a hard day’s work:
Hey folks, Maria here.
This is our 3rd day without Stuart, and I must say we have been quite productive.
We continued seedling refinds at EELR this morning. Then we discovered that we had not yet flagged many focal plants, probably because they had not been flagged during demo/Katherine’s aphid survey. So we returned to Hjelm House, and decided to do demo rechecks at Railroad Crossing and North Railroad Crossing instead. We finished in time for lunch!
In the afternoon, we used the GPS to stake and flagged focal plants for seedling refinds, and did seedling refinds. Jill and Kelly got quite a perplexing circle, where seedlings didn’t match up with maps. They found that the measurements were useful, but the map as a visual aid was not.
Around 3.15 we went back to Hjelm House to work on individual projects. I measured 3 rows of Dichanthelium plants that were planted in 99 South Common Garden. There was one super-tall plant – ~15cm, as compared to most other plants that were 1-3cm tall. Katherine and Jill sorted ants.
Karen did her crossing experiment at Hegg Lake all day. Some Helianthus heads are done flowering, and she is quite pleased about that.
Oh, and the tick eggs hatched today! Almost everyone was quite flabbergasted at the sight of baby ticks splashed on the walls of the plastic jar that we kept them in. Ughh…
Here’s an unrelated picture from July, the day Lydia and Shona GPSed/helped measure my Dichanthelium plants at Hegg Lake. I was taking a picture of Lydia taking a picture of Shona taking a picture of a plant 😀 Pic-ception!
We kicked off the day refinding Amy’s Echinacea seedlings at KJ’s. If you couldn’t tell from the previous posts, we’re all quite exasperated with KJ’s. You can imagine how ecstatic we all were to wrap up the last 5 plants today and finally get a change of scenery– seedling refinds at East Elk Lake Road!
However, as soon as we arrived KJ’s this morning, I precariously balanced my water bottle on the truck bumper, and then realized we forgot the clipboards. Kelly took the truck to retrieve them and when she returned, clipboards in hand, I couldn’t find my water bottle anywhere. Musing that it got thrown into the neighboring soybean field, I was already conjuring up a birthday present request for a nalgene. That is, until we came to the intersection with 27:
My Nalgene got carried a full 3.3 MILES on the bumper of Stuart’s truck! Kelly is simply a smooth driver.
This afternoon we harvested Echinacea heads from the common garden and Hegg Lake, and then harvested Bouteloua curtipendula at both sites.
|
|
