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Hey flog!  It was cool and overcast today in Kensington which made for wonderful weather to work in. The team spent the morning in the remnants doing demography at Railroad Crossing. Darwin’s reciever was malfunctioning, so Chekov got a chance to shine. In the afternoon, the team spent some time measuring in P1. It’s a lot of searching for staples, but one does find many cool bugs rifling through the grass. Hi Flog! I am at ESA this week presenting results from my Master’s Thesis work on solitary, ground-nesting bees. Check out my poster below! Check out this link for more updates on this experiment. Hello Flog! John’s post yesterday provided plenty of updates about Friday’s work on the Hjelm House front. Now it’s my turn to update on the second half of the Western Prairie Fringe Orchid Project, in which Gretel, Stuart, Riley, Drake, and I went out into the wet prairie to assess orchid fitness. Out in the Nature Conservancy’s wet prairie reserves (which were much drier this time around), we revisited all of the nearly 1000 orchids we identified on the first trip earlier this summer. First, we counted and squeezed all the seed pods to estimate the plant’s seed set, and then we finished shooting GPS points each plant we found. We finished our field work in good time, finishing staking of the South plot in 3 hours, and the Northwest plot in less than 2.    Yesterday, John and I got started bright and early to set out our yellow pan traps. John takes half the route and I have the other half, and we converge back at Hjelm, but it’s not until the afternoon that the fun stuff happens. When we got back to Hjelm around 9:30 we found the rest of the team had completed the great goat move in which they intricately move the goats to another area to chew down the buckthorn. I believe that job ended with a conversation about which goat Stuart would choose to roast on the large bonfire we plan on having soon. Let’s just say this, Style the Goat has another thing coming, and moving the goats is not Team Echinacea’s easiest task.  As the day commenced, it was time for some Demo and Surv at Around Landfill. There were many plants to make records for so one team took off with Checkov and another with Darwin, our two GPS units, to find our beloved Echinacea plants. We found a lot of flowering plants as we weaved in and out of barbed wire and avoided electric fences. Active searching was in full force as we scoped every likely and unlikely area for Echinacea to inhabit, hoping to find some newly flowering plants.  Over lunch, Drake and Jay updated us on their personal projects/experiments and I’m excited to learn more as they continue to develop. It’s been fun this summer seeing everyone take on their role as a teammate. We often help each other with our personal projects and are always open to asking and answering questions to bounce ideas off one another.  John and I left Surv a little early in the afternoon to collect our pan traps and bees. This was our 5th collection this summer and we have one more to go. There is still a fair amount of bees to be pinned but I have narrowed down my study field so I know which trap collections to prioritize for my personal project and the pinning that relates to that. The rest of the team is off to do more Orchid work tomorrow in Northern Minnesota so we wish them the best of luck and safe travels! Until next time, Shea Issendorf. Greetings from Team Echinacea East! Last week Mia and I presented Echinacea research at the Botany Conference in Tucson AZ. The Botany conference was an inspiring and invigorating experience (see Scott’s post too!). Not only was the research top-notch but there were plenty of workshops and networking events. Mia went to a workshop on applying to graduate school and got to interact with many other undergraduate researchers. I got to interact with other faculty at PUI (primary undergraduate institutions) and learned so much from colleagues are similar institutions. Lyn Loveless, my predecessor from the College of Wooster, was also at the conference.  The weather was HOT, like you can’t go outside after 8 am hot. However, we both got up early a few mornings for hikes through the Tucson mountain park. We may have also enjoyed the resorts lazy river post-talks a few afternoons.  Mia presented a poster on work that Laura Leventhal (see Team Echinacea 2016) started and that she carried on. Her poster was a hybrid #betterposter and was very well received. I have to admit that I was skeptical about the #betterposter but after seeing them ‘in action’ during a poster session, they are much most engaging and do a nice job of conveying the main message of a project. I presented a talk on some of the pollinator efficiency work we have been doing with Echinacea since 2010! It was neat to put all this work together into one (short) presentation. Thank you to all the team members who contributed to these data!
Our morning began fairly quietly, with phenology in P2 and the remnants underway. We officially put the pulse-steady pollination experiment to bed for the field season, with no more styles left to pollinate. Chekov was resurrected and put to the test staking the corners of P9. After lunch the entire team headed out to P9 to begin (and ultimately end!) measuring. We had a more exciting afternoon than any of us had anticipated; while measuring has its own thrills, no massive leaves or first-time flowering plants could compare with the thrill of accidentally sticking your foot in a Bombus griseocollis nest and hearing the resulting furious buzzing. I exclaimed “Uh—BEES!” and Jay and I scrambled back down the row we were working on. While I chose a two-legged locomotive strategy, I looked back and saw Jay army-crawling away from the threat. We both assumed Jay was a goner, and I continued my sprint southward.  The griseocollis were all buzz and no sting, and we returned to the plant we abandoned. There I found a katydid and a grub of some kind duking it out. The katydid was happy to climb around my arm for a photo op, and even happier to fall back into the duff and skitter away.  Before making our great escape Jay had spotted a mysterious orchid-like plant, which we lead Stuart to after he and John found another in a nearby row. We all puzzled over the plant and took careful note of its position so we can return to it later. Stuart suggested that errant seeds, micorrhizae or both may have traveled from the Chicago Botanic Garden to the plot on our equiptment, resulting in the plants establishing in the plot. Hopefully as it blooms and we get more opinions on the identity we’ll be able to make better-informed guesses about where they came from!  We were able to finish measuring every plant in P9, and will revisit the sea of white flags for rechecks in the near future!  
This morning the team split into two groups: one doing the normal morning routine of phenology and the pulse/steady experiments in P2, and the other doing demography in remnant site On 27. There were a little over 100 plants to visit, several of which were in the neighboring corn field! Then at lunch, the team got personal project updates from Erin and Julie. In the afternoon John and I worked in P8 on my personal project which involves the management of green ash within experimental plots. After Wednesday of this week I will likely be finished with treating ash!   Happy Saturday, flognation! This weekend is Flekkefest, the highly-anticipated summer festival in Elbow Lake. For the past few years, members of Team Echinacea have attended the Flekkefest festivities. It is always a highlight of the season. While Julie, Drake, and Erin went to Hegg Lake to complete the remaining pulse-steady crosses, I headed to Elbow Lake for the Flekke5k. John organizes the 5k every year and the proceeds support the impressive WCA cross country team. Each year that I’ve done the race my pace has slowed down, but I managed to come away with another troll-phy! Whew. True to theme, John sported excellent troll hair. Later, the crew plans for fireworks and other Flekkefest fun. Catch ya on the flip side!   Hi everyone! Long time no see! I am a grad student at the University of Colorado now, but thankfully I have still had plenty of time to work on some Echinacea work. Last week I got to present at Botany in beautiful Tucson, Arizona 🌵. First I presented a poster about fire and Echinacea demography. This is something we started in Chicago and Stuart, Amy Dykstra and I have been working on since. We used demap, the seedling search dataset, and the seedling recruitment experiment dataset to estimate vital rates (survival, flowering, and recruitment) within several Echinacea populations. We then estimated how these vital rates varied with fire. To see how these changes in vital rates affected actual population dynamics, we then constructed matrix models to estimate the average growth rates of several remnant populations under various fire frequencies. Finally, to see which demographic pathway was primarily responsible for changes in population growth, we decomposed the changes in population growth rates under different fire regimes into contributions from each vital rate’s response to fire. We used Bayesian modeling to estimate the vital rates. Stuart, Amy D. and I are putting the finishing touches on a manuscript for this project, so keep your eyes open! I got some good questions from people at the conference. One is: would seed addition help bolster growth rates? Very interesting question – I think it probably would in populations with high juvenile survival, given that under these circumstances higher recruitment has the largest contribution to population growth. Another person asked about climate change and whether I thought the Echinacea range was likely to move north with warmer temperatures. I can’t answer that question but we did use climate data in our models; climate was warmer and wetter in our observation period than they were in the 100 years prior, and these covariates were featured in some of our models. It would be fun to incorporate climate change into estimates of vital rates and population growth. I also gave a three-minute lightning talk to briefly present an idea I have had since I was in Chicago in 2017. Amy, Jennifer, Gretel, and Stuart have done some prior work looking at synchrony, mating opportunity, and mating success in Echinacea. I have been curious about whether populations exhibit nested structure in their flowering schedules, i.e., whether or not individuals which flower less often flower in the same years as plants which flower most often. There are some interesting potential consequences of deviation from non-nested structure. Hopefully I have time to study this in Colorado. Also of note: Jennifer gave an awesome talk synthesizing a lot of the pollinator work done in the Echinacea system the last several years. It was great to see so many facets of Echinacea pollination discussed together. One of the most interesting parts of this talk was Mia’s poster, looking at the diversity of male pollen donors on bees, and how they varied by pollinator species. I remember when Laura was collecting this data in 2016. She was so good at wiping! Very cool to see final results for this project! Otherwise, there were some great talks and posters. A couple of good ones: Joseph Braasch from Katrina Dluglosch’s lab at the University of Arizona talking about community shift with climate change and Jessa Finch (from CBG) talking about how gene flow affects early life stages of milkweeds. Maybe the best talk I saw came from a student in Julie Etterson’s lab at UM Duluth talking about how seed collections for restorations is artificially selecting for traits. Very cool question! I’m glad I was able to make it out to the conference. Huge thanks to my advisors Brett Melbourne and Kendi Davies for allowing me to work on this project for the last two years. Also thanks to the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder for providing me funding while I worked on this project, the United Government of Grad Students at CU Boulder for funding my trip to the conference, and friends at CU Boulder and Colorado State who allowed me to drive down with them and crash in their hotel rooms in Tucson. Hope to see everybody at ESA in Louisville, KY later this month, where I will have a poster about some of the non-Echinacea work I am doing in Colorado.   Hello FLOG friends, well, what feels like ages ago (actually about a month ago) Erin and I began the Aphid addition and exclusion experiment for the 2019 season. We volunteered for this task, not knowing a whole lot about what we were getting ourselves into, but we read up on past FLOG posts and procedures and even got a live demonstration from Stuart to learn how to properly remove and transplant aphids. What used to take us over 2 hours, we can now get done in just a little over an hour, so I guess you could say we are no longer novices. You’ll see in a picture or two below but these specialist aphids are not big, at all, and they definitely aren’t good cooperators, but once or twice a week Erin and I take to the field with our petri dishes and paint brushes ready for a fight.  We start each round by checking our 15 exclusion plants for aphids, and if we find any we record the amount and then harvest them for later. The tricky part about aphids is that they don’t like the sun, and they don’t like to move a whole lot unless they have to. So as we turn over leaves, exposing the aphids to the obnoxious UV, and poke at them with brush bristles, trying to agitate them into freeing themselves from the leaf, we wonder why they try to escape our dishes. As this experiment has progressed we’ve seen success in our exclusion efforts, which means that once we remove aphids from a plant we haven’t seen many come back.  Now on the other hand, we have addition. Our addition plants don’t seem too happy with us all the time. At each plant we record how many aphids it has retained and we carefully add some more. The majority of the time we add 10 aphids to each addition plants. With the passing of brushes, wrangling of aphids, and a steady hand, we get the job done. Most days, like today, the sun doesn’t give us a break, but we’ve learned to have some sort of patience as we putz around with bugs in the grass.  The management of Aphids has proven to be a much more complex task than Erin and I initially thought, but it’s been fun. The aphids make good company in the prairie as we like to talk to them, sometimes nicely, and while I can’t speak for Erin, this experiment has taught me a lot about the behind the scenes of field work. While it is a simple project, there’s nothing simple about getting 100+ speck sized bugs from one group of plants to another. This project has taught me a lot about the importance of having patience and finding purpose in our work. Until next time, Shea Issendorf. |
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