Alex and I started my last day off with going to Hegg to do some total demo!!! Alex and I headed out and started our journey. We got out there and started to get some points where the echinachea is thanks to Darwin (the gps). We were just about to start when I realized we forgot our visors. So we were like “Oh Kennedy can get them on her way here after practice”. But sadly practice was running late and she wouldn’t get there early enough. So I headed back to Hjelm to retrieve our visors. By the time I got back to Hegg Alex mapped a good majority of the sight. A little while later Kennedy arrived just in time as we started!!! We finished in no time and brought the picnic table up onto the porch for lunch.
We got cake on our last day! Thanks to Mia! I cut the cake and of course Kennedy had to give me a little trouble on how I was cutting it! Well to be fair it’s hard to cut a cake into five pieces! After lunch we headed out to P1. We were working on rechecks!! It took a good amount of the afternoon and we ended up finding lots of mushrooms out there! AND THE SECOND SMALLEST MUSHROOM IN THE WORLD!!!
After we continued P1 we headed up to clean out our bags and say our goodbyes. Goodbye Team Echinachea!!! I’m going to miss all of you so much!!! Want to know what I learned over the summer, is that you never full appreciate something until you have to say goodbye. The team taught me well, and i’m glad I was there to be a part of it.
This was my first week with the Echinacea Project, and I feel like I have big shoes to fill after all the fantastic team members earlier this summer. It’s been an eventful week, and I think I’ve seen more Liatris plants than Echinacea so far.
Laura, Alex, and Darwin flagging Liatris
This week, the team focused on completing the project to map the Liatris aspera plants at all the sites. We spent a lot of time at Koons Hill, which supposedly had only 200 plants, but we found over 600! For the first time all summer, the team had to contend with rain, but we finally finished rechecking Koons Hill today, and we revisited all the sites to pull the neon flags, which had formerly marked the Liatris plants.
Wesley, Collins, and Kennedy braving the rain
We weren’t the only ones visiting the Liatris plants. This afternoon, we spotted numerous pollinators, including several bumblebees and a monarch, which were enjoying a sweet nectar treat.
Bumblebees on LiatrisMonarch on Liatris
At the end of the day, the wasps wanted to share our sweet cantaloupe as well, but fortunately, Wesley devised a system involving a tupperware and some ice packs, which encouraged them to chill out.
B.A. in Biology and Environmental Science, University of Minnesota-Morris, 2021
Research Interests
I am interested in studying plant-insect interactions such as the role of pollination in plant fitness, and I’m curious what characteristics of fire make it so beneficial for prairie plants.
Statement
I am originally from St. Paul, MN, but I’ve spent a lot of time in the land of prairies because I just graduated from college in Morris. In my spare time, I can be found climbing trees, baking cheesecake, and peering at the undersides of leaves looking for insects. At the moment, my favorite insect is the brown mantidfly (Climaciella brunnea).
On Friday we finished measuring p1! This was a big push to get it done last week and on Friday it took some expert timing and carful radar studying but we got it done.
Mia (research intern 2020-2022) and the field crew finish measuring experimental plot p1!The waterproof measuring crew
This was a massive feat for the team, and it is super exciting to have it done. There are 10,673 total positions, out of that we found 2,899 basal plants, and 81 flowering plants, we found around 3,523 staples. Thanks to Wesley’s Time Motion Study we know that we spent 198 person hours measuring p1. Below you can see our nice completed map of p1!
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
I now have some coding to do to get ready for rechecks but for now the team is having a well-deserved break from measuring p1.
I missed a day but we have made significant progress measuring in the past few days.
On Wednesday (Aug 18) we dropped the number of segments from 32 to 19 in an afternoon with 2 measuring pairs. This was Allie’s last day measuring and we very much missed her today.
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
Today (Aug 19) we missed Allie and John but not so much that we couldn’t get anything done. The opposite in fact we got 11 segments done with 2 pairs (5 people) in ~4 hours. We have 8 segments left (woo!), today was very much a penultimate day and tomorrow might be a very big day out in p1 check back tomorrow to find out how we did.
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
Since I have been scheduled to flog today, you’ll be getting one last flog from me!
I left Andes at around 5:30am to get to MSP to pick up my dad (JR?) for the road trip back to Albany. After getting a little lost looking for what I’m pretty sure is an imaginary cell phone lot, I successfully retrieved one father and we got underway.
We made sure to stop at Culver’s for lunch, so my dad can experience what is truly the best of the Midwest on this whirlwind tour. The verdict? Fried cheese curds are amazing.
The Culver’s lunch pit stop
After that was driving, some more driving, traffic, driving, road work, and then – you guessed it – more driving!
I have now driven 791 out of the 1,371 miles to get back home in about 12 hours, covering 4 1/3 states. Yikes!
Luckily we have some good podcasts and music for the long drive.
This morning the whole team (which consisted of six of us) went out to the Riley’s for total demo. Even with getting out there a little bit late, we finished in good time. With the little bit of time we had before lunch, the crew split up to quickly harvest Echinacea heads in the experimental plots. Wesley and I harvested at P7 and P9 as well as the one Echinacea plant in Amy D’s plot (Amy your head is harvested!).
Lunch consisted of lots of acorns, which some of us got in head by. Jared collected more acorns and ended up designing a mini experiment with them. He left 30 acorns lined up on the picnic table, tomorrow we will see how many have been taken by the creatures living at Hjelm.
Jared’s acorn experiment
After lunch and the acorn experiment, Kennedy, Allie, and I headed out for more total demo. While it was hotter in the afternoon, the wind kept the heat at bay. Unfortunately the wind also decided to take my maps and blow them across the site we were working at. Throughout the afternoon the three of us finished total demo at Aanenson, West of Aanenson, and Tower. Including what we did at East Riley this morning, the three of us completed 343 locations today!
On Friday the team made great progress measuring, with the help of Gretel (World Record holder for fastest measurer) the team completed 16 segments in ~3 hours with 3 measuring pairs. We now have finished the 99’s both north and south and are off in the Q-gen/big batch experiment. We have a total of 33 segments left out of 141 segments so we are 77% complete! This is amazing and I expect that we will be done before the end of the week.
Lavender is completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
On Saturday, some of Team Echinacea took a trip up north to record seed set of the western prairie fringed orchid.
Mia, Jared, Amy, Wesley, and I (Allie) rolled out of bed to hit the road at 6am to meet Stuart and Gretel up in Fertile, MN. After finding out that Opdahl’s Donuts doesn’t open until 9am on Saturdays, we trekked out to find all the flags marking flowering orchids we found on the last trip to record seed set. The wet prairie was very not wet, one might even say dry, this time as well. Mia and I paired up to find orchids. Disappointingly, we only found a few orchids that had set seed.
An orchid with seeds! They are the swollen, green pods.Mia waters a pin flag
After a morning spent assessing seed set, we all headed into a picnic lunch in Fertile. The afternoon was spent visiting various natural areas.
First we went to the Agassiz Dunes SNA, where we botanized and also had some wildlife viewings, including some wild turkeys and some wild botanists. We tried to find the (alleged) burn break, but had no success.
Some of the ever-shifting sand dunes – Stuart saw a live blowout while we were there!The octo-oak
Then, we hopped in the car and headed to Frenchman’s Bluff SNA, one of the highest points in NW MN. We could see far into the distance, both towards North Dakota and towards the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Despite the dry and crunchy conditions, the Liatris punctata seemed to be doing quite well!
That’s North Dakota way out there!
Finally, we headed to the Felton Prairie SNA. We were aiming to walk along some beach ridges to find some fens, but instead ended up visiting 2.5 of the 3 parking lots associated with the SNA. I say 2.5 because we did find 2 of them, but the third parking lot, and coincidentally the one we wanted, remained tantalizingly out of reach.
However, in true Team Echinacea fashion, we ended up exactly where you would expect us: in a roadside ditch looking at some cool plants. In this case, we didn’t see E. angustifolia there, but we did find some cool plants usually only found in wetter conditions.
A gentian getting ready to flower
After a long day of botanizing, the team had dinner at a taco truck in Fargo, making it the first time Mia and I ever stepped foot into North Dakota. Then it was a mere hop, skip, and a car ride full of Taylor Swift to make it back to Hoffman for a well-deserved night of sleep.
Today the team continued working in the 1999 experiments. The measuring in these experiments feels slow because the plants are so densely packed but we got a good chunk done today.
With 3 measuring pairs in ~3 hours we got 12 segments done. The map makes it seem like all of 99north is done but there are actually 3 segments in their that aren’t done. Tomorrow we will finish the 1999 experiment and start Big Batch/Q-Gen which is the big green chunk on the map.
Lavender is completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
