Here’s my proposal for my project. Read it. Savor it. Constructively criticize it.
jenkins echinacea proposal.doc
It’s still very helter-skelter at this point and in need of much fine-tuning, so any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Also, I’ll re-attach the docx files from my last post in doc format.
Echinacea Pollinators nesting2.doc
Protocol for Taking Pictures of Insect Specimens.doc
On a side note, yesterday was a really exciting day because I found my first seedling, we got two bikes at a garage sale for $25 each, and there were the Runestone Days fireworks in the evening. The party lasted long into the night in K-town, and I think I remember falling asleep to the sweet sounds of AC/DC You shook me all night long coming from the street dance. These folks know how to party. I’m looking forward to the kiddie parade tomorrow! Although Amanda and I were saddened to hear it wouldn’t be a kitty parade.
Riveting indeed! Selecting one plant to observe for an hour, Wow! Lots of thinking time out there 😉
Mimi, Thanks for this proposal. I savored your ideas about floral neighborhoods.
Here are a few comments…
It is difficult to know in advance how to characterize floral neighborhoods, when you haven’t been in one. You might consider incorporating abundance of flowering species in addition to just species richness. Maybe this is what you had in mind with the idea of making maps a la seedling search.
We can talk with Gretel about trade-offs with making forms in the visor or paper datasheets.
You wrote this up as a one-person project. I think we should get a few more people involved. I think we can find a few folks who would be intetested in characterizing flowering plants in floral neighborhood and in catching bees. With more people you can increase sample sizes. Being able to sample more than one site at the same time is helpful too. Let’s discuss how you might want to sample insects from indiviudal Echincea plants in more than two remnants with more than one person.
Your right that completing the floral neighborhood characterization and the pollinator observations in the same day would probably be beneficial. I wonder how often you would want to characterize each plant’s floral neighborhoods per season. Maybe twice per season. Let’s think about a tenative schedule for the whole season that might enable us observe pollinators twice or 3x for each time we characterize floral neighborhoods.
This sounds like a fun project with great potential to yield interesting and important results!