Today Amy D. came up from the cites to help kick off sling refinds!
I had never done sling before, but I thought it was pretty cool. It’s kind of like if measuring and demo had a kid, because you have to measure all of the seedlings but also still find nearest neighbor. We were able to finish three sites today, East elk lake road, KJ’s, and south of golf course!
Amy D. and I on the hunt for seedlings!
This afternoon we worked on some p1 harvest as a team and Emma went off to work on her independent project.
It was a hot one out here today but we all made it out alive and are ready to get some more stuff done tomorrow!
Sadly today was my last day. We started off the day by moving the goats, which was really fun. Then we keeping going on rechecks in P1, and ending the day with cutting big blue stem.
I had a wonderful summer and I wouldn’t change it at all! I have always said my dream job is where I could wear rain boats and fun hats and in thing job I could. I am so thankful for all the people I met and all the experiences I got to have.
I don’t know what I will miss more, the people or my cone?
My coworkers know that P2 has held a special place for me and that sometimes they may find me staring off into the vastness of it. P2 currently being harvested and most flowering plants were decapitated, but some are still left but not for long. I sometimes daydream in P2 that its a couple hundred years ago and i am just a visitor passing through West Central MN and all i see is acre after acre of prairie. But P10, located at West Central Area Schools with its observation tower where i have spent dark evenings with my Astronomy Class is also special for me. And now P10 with its Echinacea angustifolia plots and plants flourishing in their first full growing season, it may have taken the edge over P2. We’ve been able to check to see how many plants have made it through year one and it’s at about 2/3s. Hopefully those plots can provide many years of students using the plots to collect data and learn to appreciate the prairie.
Abby VK (Echinacea Project alumni from 2015 and 2016 helps 2020 team member John VK measure P10. Abby stated “i was on the A Team for measuring plots and flower phenology back in my days, along with Will and Amy.”
This morning was spent doing P1 rechecks and Emma had 3 search and finds in a row, remarkable. The afternoon had team members help Leah collecting seeds from predetermined plots at Aanenson and East of Town Hall.
Anna, on East of Town Hall balance beam fence, just prior to her double tuck backflip dismount. Incredible.
This is my first weekend Flog—so it’s a good thing I did something kind of interesting this weekend! After work on Friday I drove out of the storm and into the sunny and windy far western Minnesota evening. I camped for the weekend at Big Stone Lake State Park, right on the MN-SD border. The lake makes up part of the curve of that bump that sticks out of the central west edge of the state, and I could see South Dakota from my campsite.
It doesn’t beat the Boundary Waters but it was a nice change of pace for the weekend. I enjoyed spending time by myself, reading, running a little, and exploring the state park some. The park’s north unit, the “Bonanza area” (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, anyone?), has some prairie restorations on dry, gravelly hills, and some treed areas near the lake. Not to sound like late-1700s Quaker explorer and botanist William Bartram, but I saw about 40 leopard frogs on one beach and estimated a frog density of 10 per square meter at some parts in the woods! The best thing I saw in the woods there was a spring/groundwater seep with clear, cold water coming out and running in a little stream to the lake. The spring and streambeds were full of reddish buildup, indicating the presence of iron-oxidizing bacteria, just like I learned about in a paleobiology class a few years ago! Sadly, the clear spring water was too good for the green, nutrient-loaded Big Stone Lake.
Some of the prairie-type areas I saw had lots of native grasses and plants, while others were more weedy, invaded by brome, woody plants, and some thistles—including one plant that towered over my head, yikes! I have always rolled my eyes at the Aldo Leopoldo quote about the ecologist seeing “a world of wounds,” thinking that I still appreciated invaded areas as preferable to concrete, but to my dismay this trip I found myself looking with a disappointed eye at the less healthy and diverse prairie sites I saw. This was probably bound to happen at some point the more time I spend in prairie ecosystems and thinking about their health and vigor, but I did not think I was going to become that person! I guess it’s a good reminder that opinions aren’t set in stone and to make space for yourself and others to learn and change!
I did learn from a knowledgeable woman who worked for the park that the mass of aquatic plant matter by the swimming beach was made up of mostly native species, so that’s something anyway.
Iron spring––note the red buildup!Nice evening at the campsite. I finished my book!
Ohhh heyyyyyyy its your friendly Team Echinacea yearlong intern who found her hair brush under her bed after it being lost for at least three weeks, Mia Stevens.
Oh boy do we have some updates for the flog!
Yesterday was a tumultuous weather day out here in Dougy county. Approximately at 4:30 am the thunder and rain began, this was some serious not messing around rain. I couldn’t sleep through it. Then at 6 there was the loudest thunder crack you have ever heard in your life. All of Andes crew jumped 6” in the air in shock. Then as we moseyed out of bed, we realized that not quite all of the lights were turning on. As we slightly began to panic about breakfast, the refrigerator, morning cups of tea, etc. Lea came to the rescue and checked the circuit breaker and fixed it all! Yay real adults! However, the one thing that did not turn back on and still hasn’t is the Wifi 🙁
We set off to Hjelm for a morning Zoom to learn about this awesome new mapping function made by Jared. The rain was still coming, enough to make even me drive the speed limit on 27. We were able to sneak in some remnant phenology, p1 phenology, demo, and even some p1 rechecks before lunch.
At lunch we enjoyed a wonderful vegan chocolate cake made by Jean, Penny, and Tulula to celebrate Jared’s week with the team. Then, the clouds came back with strong gusts of winds. We decided to call it quits on field work after lunch, and head over to Hoff house to empty it out.
Allie and I were working on some coding while double fisting halo pops when Stuart sent out a group me warning the group about the ongoing tornado warning! As two non-Midwesterners tornados are a fairly unknown phenomena, us New Yorkers know snow but that’s all about it natural disaster wise. Nothing too crazy happened in Hoffman, just some hard rain and wind. However, Lea reports it was raining sideways at Andes! But once we heard that John/Bonnie and Clyde are on tornado watch duty we instantly felt much safer. However, the lack of spotting the tornado in Evansville has made their further employment as tornado spotters come into question by some authorities, but not this one, we love you Clyde!
Clyde keeping watch!
After a recreating a scene from the Wizard of Oz we returned to Andes with a lifetime supply of halo pops. We went to bed with dreams of working Wi-Fi in the morning.
Our dreams were disappointed. We have spent the day finding ways to occupy ourselves without Wi-fi. Activities include but are not limited to: eating, drawing, cleaning your room, napping, becoming a dog groomer, reading, cleaning out your downloads folder, sunbathing, thinking about studying for the GRE, field work, and more eating.
Hopefully soon the Wifi can return and then I can choose to avoid answering emails instead of it being chosen for me.
Hi Flog! The week is going by fast, and we did some interesting things today in spite of a rainy start to the morning.
I’ll start off with some Grass Corner announcements––two cool P1 updates. The native grasses there continue to take off, with the tallest Andropogon gerardii stem measured this week maxing out the meterstick at 2.02 m! Not to be outdone, the Sorghastrum nutans flowering heads are pretty radiant this week, getting tall and showy in their half of P1. If you ever come across one, try and touch it––they’re very soft.
P1 last Monday (8/3/20)P1 this Tuesday (8/11/20). A major surge in S. nutans!
This morning Allie and I tackled demo at KJ’s, our second-to-last “annual sample” demo site, meaning it should be one of our last bigger ones. We’ve made so much progress and I’m excited to see where we are with it in another week and a half!
We had some fun and thought-provoking ABT’s and progress updates on summer projects at lunch, which was a nice chance to check in with how things are going for everyone and to practice explaining my own project. The big afternoon project was a whole-team measuring visit to P10, a set of experimental plots by the WCA high school that John uses for teaching his high school classes (sounds like an awesome teacher!!). The difference between plots that had been burned and not was stark, with immense, productive Andro in the burned plots rising feet above the neighboring vegetation. The Echinacea plants here were not as vigorous, though, since they were only planted a few years ago. Their small size made for some quick measuring when we could find them! Hopefully the high school students will think of some interesting ways to take advantage of such a cool resource.
Anna and John finishing a rowAllie and Amy, smiling behind their masks Mia and Emma, staged photo 😉A team of prairie measuring pros!
And it would be wrong not to leave you with, as promised, the frog on the flog. I saw this tree frog clambering through P1 yesterday, just a little baby!
Aww! Can you spot him?
That’s it for now––goodnight moon, goodnight grass, goodnight flog.
Monday was the start of a new week. We traded Anna M. for Anna A. and hit the ground running.
The returned Anna A. – without braces!
Anna and I started the day off herding aphids in p1. Sadly, the number of aphids is slowly declining, after never really going up in the first place.
At lunch we all got to chat with Jared Beck, visiting possible post-doc. We talked about setting things on fire, like prairie preserves and experimental plots, and statistics. Jared will be here for the whole week, scoping The Echinacea Project out and looking at possible experimental sites.
After lunch, Emma, Anna, Mia, and I headed up to p2 to try and finish the last of the measuring. We made it all the way to row 73, meaning we have 7 more rows left. If John had been around we probably would have finished measuring (we miss you John!).
It has been a busy and at times stressful few weeks in and outside of work, but I’m thankful for the supportive and reliable people around me in both aspects of my life who help me stay positive and hopeful.
In terms of work some of the people I’ve been grateful to count on the past few weeks are Allie, Anna M., and Anna A., who’ve been working with me to do demo––we’ve done one or two sites every day the last week and a half, and it’s been going smoothly. It can be kind of a zen time, just me, the GPS, and the point I’m staking to…repetitive, routine, peaceful. I’m really glad to have teammates who do their jobs well, that makes my part easy! Another thing I enjoyed doing this week was ID’ing native milkweed Asclepias viridiflora with Anna M. Something about plant ID is just fun! And fun to see someone learning it for themselves.
Today I also got to work on my independent project some, doing a pilot study out at East Elk Lake Road, a favorite site. I collected microhabitat data around maternal Sling plants, including plant community composition & flowering plants, distance to roads, slope & aspect, and litter depth. The end goal is to learn to what extent microhabitat characteristics are related to Echinacea seedling persistence! I learned a lot on my test run today about my protocol (if anyone knows how to use a clinometer hit me up), and was reminded of how much I love doing community composition sampling! It felt so natural and fun to be doing again, even though it was just a little.
One last thing is a special mention of the apple of my eye, the native grasses in P1. There is awesome species representation and it’s been so fun seeing each one’s phenology as they take turns sending up seedheads throughout the summer. First was porcupine grass (Hesperostipa Sparta), then sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula) started, then big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), followed by Indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans), and we’re now approaching my favorite grass, little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)’s flowering. So great, so diverse! Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Grass Corner with Emma.
An insect predator-prey interaction? I heard that the green bug at the bottom is a predatory species, so it may beSometimes instead of woody encroachment it’s ag field encroachment––a lone Echinacea between the soybean rowsThe most beautiful color on this sideoats grama pollen! I’d never seen such bright red pollen before.
I love Montana! My mom and I decided to take a trip out to Montana to visit colleges. We arrived in Bozeman, Montana on Friday. Since Friday we have done tons of hiking, visited Yellowstone and took a tour of Montana State University. Yellowstone had lots of people and it took us about 5 hours to drive only 30 miles! In Yellowstone we saw the grand canyon and some geysers. Today we had a campus tour and I fell in love with Montana State University and later today we are going on a cave tour.
I have done a lot of hiking in my life but this hike was by far my favorite! My mom and I woke up at 5 am to get to Hyalite Trail by 7. We hiked for about 7 miles and it was gorgeous!
Amy headed back to the Twin Cities on Friday, which left me alone at the Hoff House. Since I don’t feel risking my life everyday biking to work on 27, I moved into the Andes Tower Hills condo Friday evening.
It has new topography (a hill) and new wildlife (Lea’s dogs). Given the general lack of dogs and elevation gain in the past 1.5 months, this is much more similar to my living condition at home (upstate NY).
I’m looking forward to fun new adventures with the Andes crew!
Andes Tower Hills – elevation of 1620 ft (290 ft rise)! Bellamy (left) and Huxley (right)
