It’s great to think of the arrival of so many new Team Echinacea members in Douglas County today!! I’ve been glad to get to know Ilse in advance of the field season – she did a great job analyzing one of the long-accumulating Echinacea datasets, using aster analysis, a statistical approach for evaluating lifetime fitness from its underlying components of survival and fecundity. Charlie Geyer’s work to develop aster modeling was stimulated by our data on Echinacea. We have learned a lot about our remnant populations of Echinacea from the aster analyses we’ve completed over the last several years (see Resources page), and other analyses, in addition to Ilse’s, are in progress. Besides our regular use of aster modeling, it is now being used to study fitness in many other species.
I’m looking forward to seeing you all and working with you on Wednesday!
