This morning the whole team headed to P2 where we finished twist tying Echinaceas, we did 40 rows yesterday and another 40 today! To be honest this morning’s experience in P2 has been the best one so far! Past visits have been full of rain, misery, and soggy socks. After finishing P2 we went on a little quick field trip to a sunflower field right in front of West of Aanenson, it was quite beautiful!
When we came back to Hjelm, half of the team and me (Gael) went around P1 on Tower Road to exterminate some of the Bird’s Foot Trefoil that has been spreading around the common garden. While the rest of our team was pulling some BFT I checked around for the plants I recently treated with herbicide and THEY WERE DEAD! I was very happy to see that not only the plants were completely dead but also that the surrounding plants weren’t affected at all!
After exterminating some BFT, we came back to Hjelm to have lunch. I had some really good chicken fajitas made by my dad, and we shared some cucumbers from Stuart’s parent’s garden and some cool grapes from Maddie’s aldi’s bag.
After lunch we got some time to work on our independent projects. I went around the enclosure of the goats (now near P1) to continue my work on herbicide and pulling BFT. Aaron worked on his plants with aphids, Maddie D. worked in setting up visors to measure in P2, Grace and Kyra worked on their Bee paper, and Maddie S. went meandering (species identification walks for her thesis).
Here are some really cute pictures of today!
Echinacea picture taken by Maddie S.Me at the Sunflower field.Maddie’s picture of a bumblebee on a Sunflower.The view of P2The view of the Sunflower field.Cool frog I found by P1.
And that concludes the update of the day! Thanks for reading, see you next time, love you bye!
Last week I trekked out to Landfill to see if I could acquire some aphids and I was successful! The most successful way of harvesting them in the past which was using a paintbrush that had a small amount of bristles. However, I found most successful for preparing the Aphids to move is slightly blowing on them. This provoked them enough to retract their styles so I could sweep them using a larger paintbrush. After a drive back, I put them back onto the leaves of the addition plants in ExPt01.
This week I was met with some pretty unfortunate news after visiting the addition plants in ExPt01, they were no longer present. So to remedy this, I will venture back out to landfill and harvest more aphids and check back in with them tomorrow afternoon to make sure that they are thriving on their respective plants.
Today on Team Echinacea, we welcomed on a new week, got on our sunscreen and bug repellent, and headed off to ExPt01. We measured the 99-North Garden and finished! We are now over 50% done with measuring ExPt01. It was then time for lunch, and after many though provoking conversations, we were off to twist-tie in the 99-South Garden. We finished that up, then took a little break and went back off to 99-South to measure. We did not finish measuring in 99-South but we made a large dent in the progress. Finally, we cleaned up and did support activities and left ready for the new week.
Maddie with a Frog!Monarch in ExPt01Aaron with a different Frog!
The Echinacea Project, and its principal investigator Stuart Wagenius, is responsible for the foundation of one of the most comprehensive and long-running studies of prairie plants. Experimental plots use a common garden design and include experiments involving inbreeding, aphid addition and exclusion, flowering phenology, pollen addition and exclusion, and more. The Echinacea angustifolia in experimental plot 1 were planted as far back as 1996; while they have experienced mortality over the years, many of these plants are still alive. Team Echinacea, most of which are younger than the plants we work with, have been hard at work collecting measurements to add to the ever-expanding dataset. We take data on things like the number of rosettes, leaves, and flowering heads a plant has, as well as insect activity and disease spread, to help determine the fitness of the plants in various treatments.
A common wood-nymph being thwarted by our pollinator-exclusion bagsAn Agapostemon virescens visiting echinacea in ExPt01A fungus commonly found growing in ExPt01A jumping spider on the hunt, likely preying on floral visitorsDragonflies, abundant in ExPt08Aaron, having a standoff with a grasshopper
As of August 1, 2025, we have measured approximately 60% of experimental plot 1, which has over 11,000 planted positions. Having accomplished so much, we plan on beginning harvesting soon next week. After the heads are harvested, the achenes will be sent to the Chicago Botanic garden, where interns and volunteers will work to determine the flowers’ seed set. Throughout the rest of the field season, Team Echinacea will continue measuring in ExPt01, and begin on ExPt08, ExPt09, ExPt07, and ExPt02.
This is a map of measuring progress in ExPt01, where the blue segments have been completed and the white, unfilled sections are soon to be measured. We measure by experiment, concluding one before we move to another. We have completed the inbreeding 1 cohort, the inbreeding 2 cohort, and the first generation of the heritability of fitness experiment. Currently, we are working on the 99 main garden, a series of rows planted by Stuart in 1999.
This summer with Team Echinacea, I developed a storyline-based ecology curriculum for high school students, using the team’s ongoing tallgrass prairie research as the anchoring phenomenon. The goal was to design a unit that moves beyond textbook facts, engaging students in authentic, place-based science that mirrors the work of real ecologists.
Traditional high school ecology units often feature distant or abstract examples—ecosystems in the Serengeti, Arctic wildfires, or urbanization in far-off cities. While these are important, they can feel disconnected from students’ own communities. My curriculum instead places the tallgrass prairie, and specifically the fragmented habitats of the upper Midwest, at the center of the learning experience. This approach ensures relevance for students in the central U.S. and for any community impacted by agricultural land use and habitat fragmentation.
The unit uses real graphs, models, datasets, and field techniques generated by Team Echinacea’s long-term studies. Students will engage with authentic data on plant reproduction, population dynamics, and pollinator interactions, learning the same methods our team uses in the field—such as pollinator mark-recapture, flowering plant demography and measurements, and mapping remnant populations. These activities are paired with opportunities for students to collect and analyze data from local sites, allowing them to connect global ecological concepts to their immediate environment.
By aligning with NGSS and applying a storyline structure, the curriculum guides students through a sequence of investigations driven by their own questions. Each lesson builds on prior discoveries, deepening understanding of ecosystem function, biodiversity, and conservation strategies. The emphasis is on sense-making, not memorization, fostering higher-order thinking skills and scientific reasoning.
Ultimately, this project aims to make prairie ecology personal, urgent, and inspiring. Students will see themselves as active participants in ecological research and conservation, gaining not only knowledge but also the confidence and skills to address environmental challenges in their own backyards.
Stay tuned for updates as I pilot this curriculum in my high school ecology and environmental science classes, and with my school’s Environmental Awareness Club. I’m excited to see how this collaboration between Team Echinacea and the classroom can cultivate the next generation of conservation-minded scientists!
I also want to take this opportunity to thank Stuart, Ruth, and the entire 2025 Echinacea Project team for welcoming me into the work this summer and allowing me to learn from the many individual projects—both short- and long-term—that make up this incredible research effort. I’m excited to bring my love for prairies back to my students, but I’m equally grateful for the personal learning this experience has given me. It reconnected me with my “research brain,” something I know will only strengthen my doctoral work on science literacy equity. While I won’t miss pulling weeds or walking around in soaked socks and shoes all day, I will miss searching for Echinacea in prairie remnants, the thrill of correctly identifying stipa (porcupine grass), and the stunning Minnesota sunsets. This truly has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience—at least until I reapply in a few years because I will miss the prairie too much!
It’s the first day of August, and the team is working hard to finish measuring in P1! Now that Inbreeding 1 & 2 and qGen1 are complete, we continued making progress in the 99 garden. The goal is to begin harvesting by August 5th!
After lunch, Maddie D. updated code for the measuring data while Kyra, Gael, and I (Grace) headed out to do total demo at Staffanson West. Kyra and I finished by surveying SPPW while Gael split off and saw some very cute cows while surveying Aanenson, West Aanenson, and Around Landfill. We’re excited to continue making headway with measuring next week–hopefully with less smoky skies!
With a brand new week upon us, we were met with a few less faces than usual. Chelsea Miller is spending her final week out in Wisconsin studying prairies, and Brittany House spent her last day her on Friday. Regardless, work still needed to get done so we marched our way to ExPt01. While Gael, Maddie D, and Grace started to measure, Maddie S. and I (Aaron) went off to help Stuart’s pollinator exclusion experiment. Afterwards I joined the group in ExPt01 while Maddie S. went off to survey at NRRX. Soon it was lunch and we ate together and discussed plans for the afternoon. I went off to Landfill to see if I could harvest any Aphids. Grace worked on her and Kyra’s draft for their mark and recapture study. Maddie D. made maps about progress in ExPt01. Gael worked on his herbicide work. Maddie S. worked on her Aster Survey study for their thesis. Support activities were finished and we headed off back home for a brand new day tomorrow.
Plants are essential for life on earth, they provide food, produce oxygen, and are very very pretty! Unfortunately some plants become a problem when they are taken out of their natural habitat and inserted in another. Invasive plants can become a problem when trying to have a healthy environment for native plants as they create a competition for nutrients, water, and space. Although there are many different species of plants that are invasive there are some that are more common than others, for example: Birds Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and Sweet Clover (Melilotus officinalis) are pretty commonly found in common gardens and prairie remnants. Although Sweet Clover is very common, getting rid of it is fairly easy, you just have to wait for a rainy day and then, once the rain stops, the soil will be wet enough to just pull the plants out of the soil! The same cannot be said about Birds Foot Trefoil though, its extraction does share the same need of rain but the extraction requires the use of soil knives and very often while trying to take out the plant it will break leaving the taproot still intact.
Although there are existing methods to get rid of invasive plants, most of them are inefficient and require specific weather conditions. I decided to make a direct comparison between two methods of getting rid of Bird’s Foot Trefoil: Extraction, and herbicide. I randomly chose 20 plants of Bird’s Foot Trefoil around Tower Road and randomly selected 10 of them to be pulled out and ten of them to be treated with Green Shoots’ Blue Foaming Agent, Glyphosate 41%, and water.
While extracting Bird’s Foot Trefoil I started a stopwatch to record how long it took me to extract every plant. I divided the plants into two groups: medium plants and small plants as the difference is quite noticeable. The average time to extract medium plants was a minute and a half, while the average time to extract small plants was a minute. The amount of time is quite minimal but after applying the herbicide in the other 10 plants the difference is more noticas it took me an average of 20 seconds to apply in each plant no matter the size. Unfortunately the bigger plants were extracted some weeks ago by our team and I was not able to include it in this trial.
Using herbicide was more efficient as it took less time, it was fairly easy to use, and it can be used at any day and time as long as it’s not rainy.
Here are some pictures of the application of herbicide, the herbicide is quite hard to see but you can zoom in!
This week in the prairie, our Echinacea Project researchers are sporting the accessory of twist ties! These little colored loops may not look like much, but they play a big role in helping us track genetic crosses. By labeling individual flower heads, we can monitor pollen movement and parentage across plants. Each twist tie is a data point in our effort to understand the survival and fitness of the Angustifolia, Pallida, and their hybrid crosses in fragmented prairie populations.
Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping a close eye on my Comandra transplant experiment. I’m happy to report that several new plants have started sprouting! Unfortunately, all the transplanted Comandra plants have died. I’ll be collecting more observations to evaluate which conditions are supporting the best growth.
Around a month ago Aaron and I (Gael) started taking care of the Viola tub at Hjelm, we have been counting the number of pods on each plant, the number of pods bagged, and we have been harvesting open pods. So far the trip has had its ups and downs, for example: on June 25th, 2025 I noticed that plant #8 suffered an abrupt decrease in its number of pods, it went from having 13 pods to only having 3, it was a sad day for the violas. Although we were sad for Viola #8, we realized that Viola #2 once thought dead was resprouting!
BUT WE CAN TELL STORIES ALL DAY! Let’s talk about what this post is supposed to be:
Current state of the Viola tub:
The table below includes the planted position, the number of pods in each plant, the number of bagged pods and the number of harvested pods. All the information in the table is specifically from July 22nd, 2025.
As of July 22nd 2025:
The average of pods per plant is 6.25.
The total number of currently bagged pods is 11.
The total number of harvested pods since June 24th, 2025 including the ones in the table is 16.
