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Tuesday was a cool, windy day with scattered rain showers. In the morning we descended on KJ’s, a small site chocked full of Echinacea, to check on seedlings in Amy’s recruitment study. We made some progress, but we have a long way to go at that site.
In the afternoon, we all crammed into the pickup truck and rode over to Krusmark’s, an isolated site near the Wagenius property. Maria was especially excited to ride in the truck bed. We collected demography data on flowering plants and gathered seed from sideoats gramma grass (Bouteloua curtipendula) to scatter in the main experimental plot.
Since there were not many flowering plants, we finished up in time to catch up on chores around the field station. Here’s the Wagenius kids helping Shona clean up after her pollination crossing experiment. She and several others developed a wire contraption to keep the pollinator exclusion bags away from the anthers.
It is bittersweet to see a good summer coming to a close. Lydia left on Sunday, Andrew’s leaving on Wednesday, and Shona will head out on Friday. Although we are sad to see them go, we have plenty of work to distract us from our sorrow.
Today was a cool day! High temp of mid 70s.
Ruth and Amy came up from the Twin Cities, to give us a jumpstart to Seedling Refinds.
We overcame some technical hurdles with DroppedBoxx on Sulu and Chekov (our two lovely GPS units), and started seedling refinds at Steven’s Approach in the morning, worked way past lunch hour before Stuart called timeout.
We had lunch supplemented generously with bounty from the Wagenius family garden – juicy chestnut crabapples, ripe sweet cantaloupe, and cool yellow watermelon!
After lunch we stopped by the road outside CG2/Jennifer’s Plot at Hegg Lake, and harvested Bouteloua. We will broadcast the Bouteloua seeds in CG2 after the burn if DNR decides to burn the plot; otherwise we will broadcast half the seeds in the fall and half in spring.
Then we resumed seedling refinds at Steven’s Approach. We solved some tricky mysteries with the seedling maps, and completed Steven’s Approach! We also found a couple of flowering plants that had been missed during demo.
While we were doing all that, Karen was working hard at her independent project. The searching and keying paid off as she found a third species of Helianthus, H. tuberosus, at Hegg Lake.
Here’s an unrelated picture of a pheasant’s nest near my Dichanthelium plot. The pheasant mum and I often startled each other during those mornings when I did fieldwork.
Look, a pheasant egg!
And I know you’ll forgive me for posting yet another picture of Dichanthelium 😀
Hi all, Maria at K-town.
It was raining this morning as we bade goodbye to Lydia. All the best to Lydia as she prepares to go to Ireland for study abroad! Here’s a great picture to remember the fun times in the prairie 😀
Karen arrived at the town hall yesterday evening! This morning, she braved the rain and went out to many prairie remnants to look for Helianthus. She reports that Riley, Staffanson and Hegg Lake seem to hold the best promise for her pollen limitation experiments with H. maximiliani and H. pauciflorus, and maybe another H. species, if she can find it.
Andrew arrived back from his weekend trip announcing that he had all the food that’s bad for you all in one day. He, Shona, and Jill went to watch Alladin, the play by the Prairie Fire Children’s Theatre that Per and Hattie were in. They enjoyed it very much!
The skies gradually cleared up though temps were still in 60s-70s. It was quite chilly in the town hall.
With the squash, zucchini, and cucumber explosion 😀 😀 :D, Shona made zucchini bread. We also welcomed Kelly’s return from Northbrook about an hour ago.
Lastly, here’s a beautiful photo of Dichanthelium with morning dew:
Here’s all of my data from my crossing experiment and the R script that I used to analyze it! I’ll put up a metadata sheet soon.
angustifolia_pallidaCrossData.csv
final crossing script.txt
Hallo once again from K-town! It was yet another wonderfully nice day out in the prairie of Minnesota. This morning, Maria and Katherine headed out to the Landfill site to GPS all of the flowering plants we found earlier (about 80 of them this year). Kelly, Jill, and I headed over to Around Landfill to do demography on the plants Kelly used for her phenology project. And Shona and Andrew won (at long last) a battle with our second GPS unit (which arrived yesterday), Chekov. Chekov has come to join Sulu in our endeavors to gain coordinates. But it’s best if both work properly. Oh, and Kelly’s last plant at all her remnants finished flowering today! It’s bittersweet.
We came back to the Hjelm House later in the morning and had time to work on getting things ready and wrapped up for our poster presentations on Thursday. Yoiks! It’s coming up quick! Ruth came up with Lisa, and undergrad, and Dave, a potential post-doc for the Echinacea Project. After lunch, Dave gave us his presentation on his work with Solidago velutina (goldenrod). We then headed over to Aanenson to do demography. There were not very many flowering plants there this year, though Jill and I found a monster of one on the side of the road. We had both GPS units out with us, but we had a ton of trouble with them and were only able to GPS a few plants. We’ll just blame it on solar flares again. Once finished, we reconvened at the Hjelm House for some nummy watermelon fresh from the garden! Maria also found something interesting while we were out. We’re thinking these might be egg sacs of some sort, but we’re not quite sure.
I’m really excited to present on Thursday at the U of M! Come check it out.PolEfficiency2012_small.pdf
Title: Examining Pollen Limitation in a native prairie panic grass, Dichanthelium leibergii
MW-UMN-30×40.pdf
It has lots of cool pictures and Dichanthelium as the background! 🙂
See you at the symposium!
Here’s the poster I will be presenting at the University of Minnesota on Thursday.
Shona Sanford-Long_compatibility poster_small.pdf
Here’s a copy of the poster that I submitted for the poster session at the University of Minnesota. It has some preliminary results as well as a list of future data analysis that I want to complete.
kapsar_UofMPoster.pdf
Here is my poster for the University of Minnesota symposium. I may make some changes for the Chicago Botanic Garden symposium, but that depends on how much more data I get through by the 17th. Jillian Gall_REU Poster_Small.pdf
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