Monitoring reproductive fitness in the remnant populations is a staple Team Echinacea summer activity. Understanding the reproductive success of plants in remnant populations provides insight to a vital demographic rate contributing to the persistence (or decline) of remnant populations in fragmented environments.
In the summer of 2020, we harvested 304 seeds heads from 29 populations (AAN, AAS, ALF-E, ALF-W, BTG, DOG, EELR, ERI, ETH, GC, LCE, LCW, NESS, NNWLF, NRRX, NWLF, ON27, RIN, RIS, RRX, SAP, SGC, TH, TOWER, WAA, YOH). These are the same populations where we measured flowering phenology. We randomly selected 15 heads from each population, if a population did not have 15 heads, we harvested all of the heads. We harvested heads from the following populations.
These heads are currently in the CBG lab and soon we will start the process of removing the achenes and assessing seed set. We are unsure how exactly we will assess seed set because the x-ray at the Chicago Botanic Garden isn’t working now. We may weigh the seeds.
Mia Stevens heading out to harvest
A harvested head
In the spring, we plan on burning some of these remnants and also collecting heads next fall. Estimates of seed set from these heads will serve as a baseline for comparing seed set before and after a burn. We will learn how fire affects reproductive success in small prairie remnants.
Start year: 1996
Location: Roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and around Solem Township, MN
Data/Materials collected: 304 seed heads were collected, these are currently at The Chicago Botanic Garden along with the paper data sheets. These data sheets need to be scanned, double-entered, and checked.
Products: We will compile seed set data from 2020 into a dataset with seed set data from previous years.
You can read more about reproductive fitness in remnants, as well as links to previous flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
In 2020, we collected data on the timing of flowering for 855 flowering plants (1071 flowering heads) in 31 remnant populations. The plants ranged from having 1 to 8 flowering heads. The earliest bloomers initiated flowering on June 22nd . Plant 22195 at NWLF was the latest bloomer, only beginning to shed pollen on September 14th, nearly a month after the second-latest flowering plant had ceased producing pollen (August 18th). As is typical for the latest bloomer of a season, township mowers had mowed over this plant earlier in the season, which is perhaps why it took longer for it to sprout a new flowering stem. Peak flowering was on July 9th, when 886 heads were flowering.
A major part of the motivation behind this year’s effort in monitoring phenology was to collect baseline data on flowering rates and timing. Team Echinacea recently received funding to perform prescribed burns in these populations. Next summer, we will compare flowering patterns in populations before and after fires to understand how burns drive the effects of timing of flowering on mating patterns and fitness of individuals in natural populations.
Start year: 1996
Location: Roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and around Solem Township, MN
Overlaps with: phenology in experimental plots, demography in the remnants, gene flow in remnants, reproductive fitness in remnants
Data/materials collected: We identify each plant with a numbered tag affixed to the base and give each head a colored twist tie, so that each head has a unique tag/twist-tie combination, or “head ID”, under which we store all phenology data.We monitor the flowering status of all flowering plants in the remnants, visiting at least once every three days (usually every two days) until all heads were done flowering to obtain start and end dates of flowering. We managed the data in the R project ‘aiisummer2020′ and will add the records to the database of previous years’ remnant phenology records, which is located here: https://echinaceaproject.org/datasets/remnant-phen/. The dataset is ready to be updated, but I don’t believe it has been at the time of writing.
A flowering schedule for individuals from all remnants. Notice the gap between when second-to-last flower ceased pollen production and when the latest bloomer began on September 14th!
A flowering curve (created here using the R package mateable) summarizes the flowering phenology data that we collected in 2020, indicating the number of individuals flowering on a given day and the flowering period for all individuals over the course of the season.
We shot GPS points at all of the plants we monitored. Soon, we will align the locations of plants this year with previously recorded locations and given a unique identifier (‘AKA’). We will link this year’s phenology and survey records via the headID to AKA table.
You can find more information about phenology in the remnants and links to previous flog posts regarding this experiment at the background page for the experiment.
Products: A dataset of flowering phenology is ready to be posted on the website. It is currently located in Dropbox\remData\105_assessPhenology\phenology2020\phen2020_out and is available upon request. The headIds in this dataset have not yet been merged with the akas (long-term identifiers) in the demography dataset.
During the summer of 2019, Team Echinacea planted over 1400 E. angustifolia seedlings into 12 plots in a prairie restoration at West Central Area High School in Barrett, MN. We planted seedlings from three sources: (1) offspring from exPt1, (2) plants from my gene flow experiment, and (3) offspring from the Big Event. To test how different fire regimes affect fitness in Echinacea, folks from West Central Area plan to apply regular fall burn treatments to four plots, regular spring burn treatments to four other plots, and the remaining four plots will not be burned. I’m not sure if they were able to perform these burns as planned in Fall 2020 given COVID restrictions this spring and fall, but John Van Kempen would be the man to ask about that. I believe they were able to do the burns in the spring.
This summer, the team measured the 1-year old seedlings from my gene flow study in exPt10, as well as a few seedlings from the other plantings within the plot. The seedlings from my gene flow experiment are the offspring of open-pollinated Echinacea in 9 populations in the study area. I am assessing the paternity of these seedlings to understand contemporary pollen movement patterns within and among the remnants. In summer 2018, I mapped and collected leaf tissue from all Echinacea individuals within 800m of the study areas and harvested seedheads from a sample of these individuals (see Reproductive Fitness in Remnants). In spring 2019, I germinated and grew up a sample of the seeds that I harvested to obtain leaf tissue for genotyping.
Then, with the team’s help, I planted these seedlings in exPt10 in June 2019. I also collected seeds and leaf tissue in summer 2019 to repeat this process, but I did not germinate the achenes in the following spring because I was not able to assess seed set due to the broken x-ray machine at the CBG and then COVID-related restrictions. I hope to germinate those this spring and plant in summer 2021. I am working on extracting the DNA from the leaf tissue samples I have, which I will use to match up the genotypes of the offspring (i.e., the seeds) with their most likely father (i.e., the pollen source).
Here are some fun facts about the seedlings we found in exPt 10:
The longest leaf we saw was 19 cm! Most were much smaller (see below).
The leafiest plant we saw had 4 leaves (though one had been munched)
Overall we found 424 seedlings alive of the 598 that we searched for, or 71%. The ones we didn’t find are probably dead, but we’ll look for them again next year to make sure we didn’t just miss them.
I’m looking forward to seeing these friends again next year.
Allie gives a thumbs after successfully finding a baby Echinacea plant in p10!
Start year: 2018
Location: West Central Area High School’s Environmental Learning Center, Barrett, MN, Remnant prairies in Solem Township, Minnesota
It’s Emma Greenlee back for part 2 of my independent project, data analysis! My project draws from the Sling project, in which Team Echinacea annually tracks the survival of Echinacea seedlings that originated between 2006-2013 for an extensive record of survival and mortality in these seedlings. During my internship with the Echinacea Project this past summer I collected data in the hopes of finding out whether Sling seedling survival varies with microhabitat characteristics. Now that Carleton is on our 6-week-long winter break, I’m analyzing that microhabitat data with the goal of putting together a poster to present at an ecology conference next summer.
After a week of working on this, starting from a fairly low level of R knowledge, I have learned a lot and feel like I’m still very early in the process. I started the week doing some R tutorials and lessons and checked in with Mia daily on Zoom to talk about any questions I had. She set up a nice outline to help me get started and has been really helpful, so shout out to Mia! I have spent most of my time cleaning my data, which is separated into two data sets, one containing microhabitat data on litter depth, vegetation cover, slope, aspect, distance to roads and fields, and plant community composition in each sling circle, and the other containing records of all flowering species and number of inflorescences at each sling circle. Once it’s formatted how I want I will start some exploratory data analysis, hopefully at the start of next week.
I also got to go to the Echinacea Project’s zoom lab meeting this morning, where the group discussed an outline for the introduction to the sling paper Lea is working on. It was nice to see everyone, and to hear about how the sling research will translate to papers and the kinds of decisions that are involved in thinking about how to set up a research paper. This morning there was also a seminar put on by the CBG where speakers representing Plants of Concern, restoration research at the garden, the Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie seedbank, and Budburst presented a little about their projects and how other collaborators can get involved. A common theme among the presenters was an emphasis on citizen science and even “community science,” a term I hadn’t heard before but thought was awesome.
Just looking at the vegan package for R made me feel like a real ecologist this week, looking forward to continuing to build on what I know next week.
Stuart and Drake on November 24th, 2020 discussed how Drake should go about entering the data he collected on his circles, apply named “Drake’s circles for the possible intedended purposes of burning with fire and planting with parasites” or “demcirc” for short.
Drake went to the following sites and set up 10 randomly placed (to the best of his ability using his cellphone, laptop, and paper maps) circles: South of Golf Course, East Riley/Riley (10 total across both), Woody’s, Leuffler’s Corner East, Leuffler’s Corner West, Hill across from Leuffler’s Corner West, RRX, NRRX, In front of the Tower Rd Tower, Nice Island, The hill just east of Unity Drive on Hwy 27, Around Landfill North, Around Landfill South, Sap, TH, NNWLF, and KJs.
Additionally 30 circles each at: Aan, Eelr, Landfill, AgalinisRRX (NW Corner of Roland Lake RD and Hwy 55), and all-around Wennersborg Rd SW & HWY 55.
Each circle had a radius of ~0.4m and I recorded every species present within the circle and I recorded whether they were flowering (or had flowered at some point that year) or not.
During the summer of 2020, I designed an observational study to assess the extent to which reproduction in self-incompatible species is limited by spatial proximity to mates. While many researchers assume mate-limited reproduction is common in prairie species, few studies demonstrate this relationship in species other than Echinacea. I hypothesize that many self-incompatible prairie species produce few viable seeds because of small population size and spatial isolation from mates. To test this hypothesis, I selected 8 common self-incompatible native prairie species and 25 remnant sites within which to work. I quantified isolation in meters from the two nearest flowering conspecifics and collected seeds for more than 1,100 individual plants at 25 prairie remnant sites. I hope to complete lab work over the next 6 months where I will be cleaning and counting viable seeds for each individual plant. Results from this study will provide evidence about how widespread mate-limited reproduction is in self-incompatible prairie species.
Start year: 2020
Location: Douglas County, Minnesota; 25 roadside remnant sites Information about how many species of each species were sampled from each site, check out this file ~Dropbox/teamEchinacea2020/leaRichardson/siteCheckList8.29.20.xlsx
Materials collected: Seed heads collected from over 1,100 plants will be stored at the Chicago Botanic Garden but are currently in my Evanston apartment.
Data collected: Find data related to this project in the aiisummer2020 repository in ~aiisummer2020/plasInRems/leaStuff/
Throughout the summer, I designed and collected materials to establish an experiment in experimental plot 1 to study parasites and their impact on the community of host plants they live in. Parasitic plants are plants which absorb nutrients from neighboring plants. Parasitism is an important part of nutrient cycling in many ecosystems and parasite scientists hypothesize it to be an important part of prairie ecosystem maintenance.
This experiment has three factors, each with two levels (presence or absence), but three factor-level combinations are impossible, because the presence of parasites is confounded with presence of soil. Which translates to me having 216 row x position combinations in which I randomly assigned Comandra umbellata, Pedicularis canadensis, and soil plugs. However, because roots trap soil and therefore soil is always carried in with parasites, the two are confounded and so we used soil transplants to account for this.
I developed this experiment to address questions about the impact native parasitic plants have on plant community members. In late October I harvested biomass from my pipp places to understand how species diversity and abundance change after planting parasites.
Start year: 2019
Location: Douglas County, Minnesota; exPt 1
Overlaps with: Experimental plot management, Hesperostipa common garden experiment
Materials collected: 216 .1 x 1m strips of dried biomass are stored at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Data collected: Find data related to this project including the planting scheme in the cgdata repository in ~cgdata\summer2019\Hemiparasites (note/the key for HemiparaMap: C. umbellata = Blue, P. canadensis = Red, C + P = Purple, Soil plugs = Brown, Just seeds = Green).
This past Friday I planted the seeds from the inter-remnant crossing experiment I completed over the summer. The goal of this experiment is to understand how the distance between plants that live in little fragmented remnants and the difference in their timing of flowering influences the fitness of their offspring. The expectation is that if plants that are close together and/or flowering at the same time are closely related, their offspring might be more closely related (i.e., inbred) and have lower fitness than plants that are far apart and/or flowering more asynchronously. If this is true, then it would suggest that individuals in small, fragmented habitats would benefit from reaching more distant or dissimilar mates, such as by introducing seeds from faraway populations to remnants, creating corridors that promote pollinator movement, or managing habitat to increase heterogeneity in flowering time.
Plot location & layout:
The plot is located directly to the east of P1, spanning 12 m east to west and 30 m north to south, between positions 860 and 890. See Mia’s flog post from September for more information about how we prepared the plot by clipping the grass and treating the sumac with Garlon. Mia also used Darwin to shoot points within and along the edges of P1 so that I could generate coordinates for each position in my planting that aligned with P1’s crooked grid. This was a good exercise in geometry. I figured it out, but not before googling how to find the intersection of two lines. Oh well!
When I laid down the meter tapes based on the end points of the rows in this grid, it matched pretty well (the rows were supposed to be exactly 30 m long), but they were off a bit due to topography and the vegetation keeping the tape from laying perfectly flat. It was right on for row 58 and off by ~5cm in rows 62 and 65. We lined up meter sticks with the flags placed ever two meters and positioned achenes relative to according to the flag positions, rather than the tape. We placed 4 achenes per meter in positions 860-889.75.
Randomization:
Based on the number of seeds I had, and the expectation that I might want to plant more for this experiment in the future, I randomly chose three rows (58, 62, and 65) to plant out of the twelve total rows that fit in the area that we prepared. I randomly assigned positions to all of the full achenes, based on their weight. Prior to planting, I placed each of these achenes into a 1.5mL microcentrifuge vial and labeled it with its planting position (1-360). I sorted the vials in order of planting position and placed them in vial trays that we brought into the field.
Planting:
It was a dry and unseasonably warm day. This is lucky because there was 10 inches of snow where the plot is located a week and a half earlier. I was able to convince Matthew and Gooseberry to come along to help. Matthew was extremely helpful, but Goose mostly ate deer poop all day and threw up on the way home. Very yucky! To set up for planting, I staked to the end points for the rows we were planting, set up a meter tape, and then staked to and placed pin flags at positions every two meters along the rows. I started by placing pin flags every meter, but this was time consuming and a pin flag every two meters gave us a sufficient reference point for each meter.
We liked breaking the actual planting into two steps, and working in a pair, because it meant that we had fewer items to fumble around with and it was easy to catch and fix each other’s mistakes, such as accidentally skipping positions. I do not believe we made any actual goofs, which is a first for me with planting! For the first step, one person cleared the duff, and the other placed the corresponding vial. For the second, one person placed the achene and collected the vial, while the other placed the toothpick and carried the clipboard, making any notes, e.g., if the achene was planted a few cm off the row to avoid placing it on a rock or in bunchgrass. The first step took about 10-12 minutes per 50 positions. The second took about 8-10 minutes per 50 positions. We set the achenes on top of the soil so that they had good contact with the soil, but weren’t buried. We finished around 4 PM and were grateful that we did not have to plant in the dark.
I hope the seeds have a good winter and I look forward to seeing them in the spring!
Yesterday Stuart and I took a trip into the Garden! This was the first trip into the Garden for me which I was very excited about. Stuart showed me around the lab and I have a much better sense of the ACE process now.
As we walked around the lab there was this almost eerie feeling. Almost like someone had stepped out mid-day for lunch, and Stuart and I being there is disrupting their work.
Char’s cleaning was interrupted, this didn’t stop the spiders from building a web…This patch was half way through being randomized, and just stoppedTime has actually frozen in March… but no more
Hopefully I can start the inventory process on all of heads collected in 2020 soon! It’s all just so exciting!
I’ve relocated! Stuart and I finished up the last of field work on Friday and have moved back to Chicago. I moved into my new apartment on Saturday!
Rain passing by p1
Last week we finished up many tasks including, p1 harvest, demo, remeasuring any problem records in p1, pulled all flags in p2, p7 and p9. Overall it was a great week we got a lot done!
P2 before it was de-flaggedP2 after it was de-flagged
I celebrated my birthday last Monday by making myself some apple crisp. It was very yummy!
The birthday crisps!
I am definitely going to miss Minnesota but am very excited about my new adventure in Evanston!
