Today we recorded first flowering dates for the early-flowering Echinacea plants in our remnant populations. For short, we call this activity “phenology.” Now we want to estimate how many total plants will flower this year at each site.
At four remnants (eri, sap, yohe, and lfw), we also recorded as many plants as we could find in bud. The ratio of currently flowering plants (flPla), to all plants in bud (allPla) at these sites ranged from 9 – 27%.
The below table shows the estimates (guesses) of how many plants will flower at each site this summer based on the assumption that 10% (guessHigh) and 25% (guessLow) of plants at each site are already flowering.
> aa[order(aa$guessLow), ]
site proFl allPla flPla guessLow guessHigh
12 nwlf 0.00 2 0 0 0
16 rrxdc 0.00 2 0 0 0
20 tower 0.00 1 0 0 0
23 woody 0.00 1 0 0 0
5 gc 0.50 2 1 4 10
17 sgc 1.00 1 1 4 10
10 lcw 1.00 2 2 8 20
11 nrrx 1.00 2 2 8 20
22 tplot 0.50 4 2 8 20
25 yohw 0.67 3 2 8 20
3 eri 0.09 33 3 12 30
6 kj 1.00 3 3 12 30
15 rrx 0.43 7 3 12 30
21 th 0.75 4 3 12 30
24 yohe 0.22 18 4 16 40
1 aa 0.56 9 5 20 50
19 sap 0.19 26 5 20 50
4 eelr 0.54 13 7 28 70
18 sppe 0.57 14 8 32 80
2 alf 0.50 20 10 40 100
13 on27 0.60 25 15 60 150
8 lfw 0.27 74 20 80 200
7 lfe 0.39 62 24 96 240
14 ri 0.44 54 24 96 240
9 lce 0.74 34 25 100 250
>
These estimates will help us decide which populations to choose for our planned systematic observations of bees this summer.
Leave a Reply