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Hello! I’m Kelly. I’m a junior biology major at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. My hometown is St. Louis, Missouri where I live with my parents, an ancient dog and an obnoxious, paper-eating cat. My favorite animal is the beluga whale. I love to hike, bike, and swim. I hope to do some of those things this summer. I have also made it my goal to learn to cook without accidentally burning, breaking, botching or otherwise bungling anything.
I’m really excited to be a part of the Echinacea Project this summer! My first week in Kensington is just now coming to a close. I’ve had a wonderful time and I already feel like I’ve learned a ton about both Echinacea plants and the prairie ecosystem as a whole. For my independent project, I hope to study flowering phenology in several of the remnant populations. There’s a great crew of people here this summer and I can’t wait to meet everyone else who works on the project.
Hi everyone! As Andrew reminded us all a few minutes ago, we were supposed to introduce ourselves this weekend and the weekend is just about over, so here it is.
I’m Shona. I’m a rising Junior at Middlebury College in Vermont, where I’m majoring in biology and grew up on a small organic farm also in Vermont. I’m excited to join the Echinacea Project this year, and to get a taste of what biology research is really like. When I am not crouched in the field doing seedling searches or recruitment surveys, I am planing to focus my independent project on hybridization between Echinacea angustifolia and Echinacea pallida. Someday soon I will post a link to my proposal here, once it is a little bit more polished…
This is the first time I’ve been to Minnesota, and I’m looking forward to exploring and enjoying the beautiful landscape and all of the wildlife (I had no idea that Pelicans lived out here!), and getting to know the rest of the group better. I’ve only been in K town for a week but I can already tell that I’m going to be happy here!
I’m sure I will add on to this more later, but here is my project proposal as it is right now:
echinacea project proposal.pdf
Hi!! My name is Lydia, and I hail from the Twin Cities metro area. I will be a Junior at Bethel University this fall. I play violin, piano, harmonica, and other random assortments of instruments. My favorite animals are wombats and penguins and I have a very strong liking for peanut butter. In my spare time, I like to read, hike, bike, puddle jump, and laugh with my friends and family. Oh, and I like making weird faces. And it’s a fact that sound effects make everything better.
So far, I have been in Kensington for nearly 3 weeks and have been enjoying every minute of it. I am well on my way to developing the echinacea eye! In addition to seedling searches, we’ve learned to use the GPS to find focal plants, done data entry, and built a new frame for mapping seedlings. This summer I am planning to look at self-incompatibility and style persistence in Echinacea angustifolia. As of now, I am thinking of collecting data from one or two remnants.
Maria here. I’m back for my second year with Team Echinacea on the field!
I plan to continue work on Dichanthelium this summer. I had written a proposal for my summer project for a research scholarship earlier, here it is for your reference:
Krieghbaum Scholarship _Wang.pdf
And updates from the maternal lines germination experiment with seeds I collected last summer!
URG Final Report.docx
Currently trying to figure out the nits and grits of the Dichanthelium hand pollination technique. Wish me luck, Uff da!
Also been poking through my photos from last summer. It’s so funny how similar some of them are to this year’s photos.
Katherine here.
Most of the Echinacea crew arrived on Sunday. The week has gotten off to a running start. Here are some pictures from our first few days in action:
Here’s a data sheet that will show locations where we’ll plant Echinacea Hybrids. Echinacea at Josh’s Garden-Excel.xls
Last summer I conducted a biweekly survey of aphids and ants in the common garden, an experimental prairie restoration containing Echinacea from various remnant populations. I was interested in the spatial distribution of aphids and ants within and across years. This year I plan to scale down my survey to once a month, beginning next Friday. Here’s a detailed protocol:
Common Garden Aphid Survey Protocol 2012.doc
We just reorganized the bee collection into a cornell drawer, and need a cabinet to start storing drawers. Once we have better humidity control in the Hjelm house this is the cabinet we are considering.
cabinet
We delayed our fieldwork for a few minutes this morning because of scattered showers. Who knew we should have delayed for a few more minutes because of Solar X-Ray Flux?
The National Weather Service’s weather radar indicated that the rain (aka atmospheric H2O flux) was mostly south of us, so we knew it would be a short delay. However, we should have checked NOAA’s space weather forecast…
When we arrived at the site, the atmospheric weather was OK, but the space weather was poor and our gps machine, Sulu (a Topcon GRS1), had a difficult time getting oriented. It may have been groggy because of the burst of solar X-Ray Flux. Here is the graph of Solar x-ray Flux from NOAA:
Just our luck! Next time we’ll check our local weather forecast and the space weather forecast!
Here is Sebastian Di Clemente’s final report on the main project of his internship:
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