2024 was a relatively low-flowering year in the common gardens, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t bring plenty of Echinacea heads back to the lab for our volunteers! Here are our stats:
TOTAL: 689heads
exPt01: 82 heads (11.9%)
exPt02: 375 heads (54.4%)
exPt07: 87 heads (12.6%)
exPt08: 23 heads (3.3%)
exPt09: 110 heads (16.0%)
tplot: 12 heads (1.7%)
(rounding errors in %s abound)
Our first harvest was at p2, p7, and p9 on August 19th. Our last harvest was all the way on October 3rd at p7 and p9! Those hybrid plants really held on for awhile. Unfortunately, our first harvest was not in time to harvest some heads before they begin dispersing, and there are always a couple that lose achenes throughout the harvest season before we catch them. This year wasn’t toooo egregious, but our worst head lost an estimated 85% of its achenes before we encountered it. Yikes! Keep an eye out for seedlings around (7, 2) in p2…
A few achenes shy of a full head…
One major victory from this year is that, besides a couple holes and piles of dirt, the ground squirrels were relatively well behaved in p2 this year. Typically, they enjoy ripping heads off echinacea plants and leaving stems, heads, and achenes everywhere. Based on harvest notes, in 2024 we only found two heads on the ground and only one was missing entirely. Compare this to 2022, when the team only harvested 41% of the heads they planned on harvesting due to ground squirrel activity. (Though, I suspect this may have been a blessing—they still harvested 480 heads. If they’d harvested all of them, it would have been around 1,170 heads. That’s a lot of harvesting!)
Another fun fact: The 99 south garden in p1 produced 25 heads this year, but its 99 north counterpart didn’t have a single flowering plant.
Additionally, we did visit p5 this year and found several flowering (and some basal) plants, but were instructed not to harvest them, so we didn’t.
cg heads in the seed dryer prior to going through the ace process in the lab. It isn’t every year when almost all of your gBags fit in the seed dryer at once! I bet I could’ve made em all fit if I really squeezed them, but what’s the rush?
We still have a couple of gBags from 2023 to clean, plus 10 from this year. We like keeping our volunteers stocked! We’ll send exPt01 2024 through first, just after the remnant heads. And so the cycle continues!
Follow the tire tracks from the parking space at EELR north towards the crest of a hill and you will find several piles of yard waste that appear to have been dumped recently. I came across these piles on October 11th while pulling flags from summer experiments. Among the debris are many flowering stems of Echinacea purpurea.
Standing at the site, facing south. Highway 25 at the top left corner.One of a few yard waste piles!Echinacea purpurea… an unexpected site in a remnant prairie in western MN.
This summer, I had the privilege of leading an exciting project investigating the effects of prescribed burns on plant communities in Minnesota’s prairies. Land managers commonly use prescribed burns to prevent the spread of woodlands and promote native prairie plants. While the positive effects on native plants have been shown, the impact on exotic flowering species remains unexplored. My research aims to fill this gap by comparing how prescribed burns affect the flowering of native and exotic species. Ultimately, I hope to provide land managers with insights on how to better use fire to protect and restore prairie ecosystems.
The data collection phase was a collaboration with the Echinacea Project’s floral assessment experiment, which seeks to quantifying the floral resources are available to pollinators at our sites. I was responsible for planning data collection routes and coordinating teams to survey across 42 sites. At each location, we identified and recorded the flowers present and estimated their abundance. This part of the project was the most rewarding aspect of my summer. Getting to know the individuals that make up the plant communities of Minnesota’s prairies gave me a deeper understanding of their unique ways of existing and how they come together to form larger prairie ecosystems.
Moving forward, I’ll be analyzing the data our field teams collected, comparing this year’s findings with last year’s to assess how plant communities change before and after burns. This comparison will allow us to track changes in species richness, diversity, and abundance before and after a burn event, providing a clearer picture of the role fire plays in shaping prairie ecosystems.
While there’s still plenty of analysis ahead, I’m excited to see where this research leads! A big thank you to the 2024 Echinacea team for an amazing summer—I learned so much and enjoyed many giggles, hijinx and things to make you think! Rah!
A close up of an Agapostemon specimen with its tongue sticking out. The current collection of bees. Many more to come!
As of a few weeks ago, Emergence trapping for the ENRTF project is finished! It was a massive endeavor to complete, and I’m thankful for everyone on the team who pitched in. Now that our vials of bugs have been moved from Minnesota to Illinois, it’s time to start going through them to look for bees. It’s smelly work, but also a great opportunity to brush up on taxonomy and identification skills. We’re planning to hire a work-study student to help with pinning and data entry in the next few days. Until then, more for me!
NOTE: Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
Currently, I’m writing this from my new apartment in Chicago! Classes start next week for me, and I’m moving on to the data management portion of my summer project. This summer, I looked at pollen and nectar quantity in Coreopsis palmata (prairie coreopsis) in burned vs. unburned sites. But why does this matter? Pollinators depend on pollen and nectar from flowers to supply the nutrients they need to survive. However, there has yet to be a strong comparison between common Asteraceae plants identifying the quantity and quality of plants that can be shared with land managers to help create more viable resources for pollinators in their prairie restoration efforts. Therefore, I wanted to conduct a study looking at pollen and nectar quantity in common non-Echinacea prairie plants to examine how prescribed fire affects plant resources for pollinators.
The sites I collected data from included Torgeson North and South, Tower and Nice Island, and Yellow Orchid Hill West. Pollen data was collected by selecting three immature florets from three flower heads in a “patch,” defined as five or more stems in one central location. These immature florets will then go through a lab process where they are sliced open and placed into an agar solution, allowing the pollen to float to the top, where it can be counted. Nectar collection was done using microcapillary tubes, where we measured the amount of nectar in each tube in millimeters. The volume of nectar can then be calculated based on the size of the microcapillary tube in relation to the measurement in millimeters obtained from the tube. In total, I had around 75 pollen and nectar measurements. I also collected transect density data for each “patch” that we sampled and mapped them in Avenza for future reference. This allows me to identify and see how dense the populations are within a certain site, and to determine if there is a difference between burned vs. unburned areas.
I was not able to study more than one species this summer, but we shall see what the next summer holds!
NOTE: Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
Team Echinacea finished Total Demo today! That was a big undertaking. We visited 2640 locations to search for Echinacea plants in our remnant sites. But we’re not done with our remnants yet. Today we started de-mopup or demopup. In the likely event that we missed a few flowering Echinacea, we revisit each site to do a thorough search. I am not sure if we are as thorough as this AI puppy mopping the floor, but we strive to find the Echinacea Plants that no one else will find.
Hailey hand pollinated flowers on six silver-leaf scurf pea plants (Pediomelum argophyllum). We are harvesting the plants as the pods ripen. Wyatt harvested two plants on 30 Aug, I harvested two today (9 Sept). Two remain–each is attached to a pin flag so it doesn’t tumble way. But don’t seem like that will happen soon.
Yesterday I squeezed every pod from the plant that Wyatt harvested S of 23518-L. They all felt the same (empty), including the treatment pods that have yellow & blue twist-ties. Many of the pods had fallen off the stem, but not the bagged one. This time I gently put the entire plant into a large paper grocery bag to keep the pods on the stems. I regret i didn’t take any photos of the plants.
Stay tuned to learn about effects of hand pollination on seed set in the silver leaf scurf pea!
Let’s consult our total demometer to see how much progress we’ve made. The team has tackled some large sites in the past few weeks. We’ve made lots of progress! We’re about 45% done with all locs.
