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Echinacea Project 2019
Biology and Environmental Studies, Tufts 2018
Starting a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UConn in August 2019
Research Interests
My research interests are, like most researchers at this stage, all over the place, but in general I love anything that has to do with plants, insects, and landscapes. I’m a big fan of studying communities: not just one plant or insects, but all the plants or insects that are in a certain space. I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t have research interests that also go into soil, leaf chemistry, birds, mammals, and hydrology. I guess I just like nature?
Statement
Hello again flog! I know I write here about 1-2 times a week, but I thought it necessary that I should write a new intro for a new summer field season. I’m wrapping up my year here as the Echinacea Project’s intern at the Botanic Garden with a return to the summer field crew. I’m very excited to get out and work with the plants again! In my spare time, I like to hike, run, read fantasy, and play video games (hey Riley, wanna Pokemon battle?)
 It’s -5 F in this picture
Echinacea Project 2019
Biology Major, Gustavus Adolphus College ’20
Research Interests
The the recent 2018 Nobel conference at Gustavus has gotten me interested in soil ecology. I want to know what goes on in post-agricultural and fractured prairie ecosystems and what the implications are for species richness and productivity underground.
Personal Interests
I am a Biology major minoring in Statistics and English from Waseca, MN. In my free time I like foraging for mushrooms, gardening, and anything that gets me outside. I also like making mixed media art, video games, and trying to learn Swedish.
Echinacea Project 2019
Biology Major, College of Wooster 2022
Research Interests
I hope to learn more about the interactions between echinacea and their pollinators, growth mechanisms that plants employ, and the environmental impact of fragmentation on flowering plant species as well as their pollinators. I aspire to obtain a PhD in botany and continue to research the environmental and molecular functions of plants.
Statement
I am from Medina, Ohio and enjoy gardening, running, biking, cooking, and reading. I also love to spend time in nature and am looking forward to working with echinacea and the rest of the research team!
Hey flog! I’m back!
Echinacea Project 2019
Biology, College of Wooster 2020
Research Interests:
In general I am interested in how plants interact with their surroundings, particularly the other plants in the system. I worked with Team Echinacea last year on a project attempting to determine how many pollen grains it takes to set a seed. Turns out it doesn’t matter and on the head a floret is that determines seed set! In the fall/this summer I will be starting my senior thesis/IS (independent study) with a plant called Coral Bean (Erythrina flabelliformis) in Arizona. I will be investigating how mating is affected by the amount of flowers on a plant and geographic/temporal distance between plants.
Personal Interests:
I am now a senior biology major with a minor in environmental studies at the College of Wooster. I am from Buffalo, NY. At school I am former president of knitting club, but recently I have really gotten into embroidery. I also enjoy spending time outside with my dog named Ellie.
 Me last summer feeding one of the goats buckthorn MEEC 2019:
On a different note another student from Wooster (Nate) and I presented at MEEC. We presented a poster on my pollen to seed ratios from my research last summer. As it turns out, pollen is not the limiting resource to determine seed set but instead the location of a floret on the flower head.
Nate and I at MEEC with our poster. Link to poster:Pollen to Seed Poster
Title: Resources or pollen: examining seed set in a common prairie perennial.
Presented at: MEEC 2019 at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, IN
When: April 27, 2019
Echinacea Project 2019
Biology, The College of Wooster ‘20
Research Interests:
I am interested at investigating how different species of solitary bees impact male fitness in Echinacea. Additionally, I’m interested in the varying impacts climate change is having on different ecosystems and the interactions between organisms within these ecosystems.
Personal Statement:
I am a Biology major and Classical Studies minor from Cincinnati, OH. I will be part of the lab team in Wooster this summer, but will also join the field team in Minnesota for a few weeks during flowering season. In my free time, I love reading, baking, and exploring the outdoors. I also enjoy swimming and spending time with friends and family.
Jennifer L. Ison
Echinacea Project 2019
Assistant Professor of Biology, The College of Wooster (Wooster, Ohio), 2015 -present
Research interests
I’m a plant ecologist who is interested in how plants in human-altered landscapes mate. In particular, I’ve examined how spatial isolation and variation in flowering times limit mating opportunities between plants. Recently, we have examined how visits by different native bee species impact reproduction in insect-pollinated plants. We have found that the specialist-solitary bee, Andrena rudbeckia, is the most efficient Echinacea pollinator, both in terms of pollinating florets (individual flowers) and removing pollen (Page et al. submitted; Zelman 2019 thesis). However, we have also found that Andrena is typically only found in the largest Echinacea populations and is only active during early and peak flowering time (Ison et al. 2018 Oikos).
Last summer we conducted a large field experiment to understand how visits from different native bees contribute to a plant’s male fitness (siring success). For more information about this project please read Mia’s great flog post about the project. This summer Mia, Avery, Miyauna, and Ren are working genotyping the offspring from this study using previously developed genetic tools.
Statement
I’ve collaborated with the Echinacea Project for many years (before there was even a flog!). I started as a Team Member back in 2003 after graduating from St. Olaf College. After a few years, I started my dissertation research on Echinacea. After completing my dissertation, I took a few years off the Echinacea Project to work on a plant that takes 30 days (instead of 7 years) to flower. However, I couldn’t stay away from Echinacea and have been examining Echinacea‘s pollinators since 2013. When I am not watching bees on Echinacea, I enjoy hiking, especially with my very active nearly-four-year-old.
Echinacea Project 2019
Biology Honors, Gustavus Adolphus College ’19
Research Interests
My research interests include everything from community ecology to population and quantitative genetics and physiological ecology. That said, I love linking these different fields to plant conservation. I have found recently that I enjoy reading quantitative and population genetics papers the most that link their work ultimately to community dynamics. I recently completed my senior honors thesis at Gustavus with data from Team Echinacea’s hybrid experimental plot 7, and working with the data made me think of some interesting questions regarding the genetic structure of Echinacea angustifolia within the remnants.
Statement
I am from the wonderful suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. In my limited free time, I like to spend time with friends, play sports (softball, tennis, etc…), and play board games – especially cribbage. I also really love to be outside and go for walks, hikes, runs, and bike rides. I took a plant systematics course my final semester of college, so I have recently taken to naming every tree that I walk by when I am with friends. My final area of deep interest is competitive Pokémon battling; it really gets me to use my brain in new, creative ways, even if it is a children’s game.
 This is me at school during a march for climate action (I’m the one with the sign)!
It’s time to recap everything that’s been going on with the Echinacea Project for the last 12(ish) months – and trust me, it’s a lot! We report all of this info annually to our two major grant providers, CBG & UMN. This includes all of our lab and field activity.
Last spring the lab was busy as always. Led by Tracie, volunteer citizen scientists at the Chicago Botanic Garden finished cleaning heads harvested in summer 2016 and began cleaning heads harvested in 2017. These volunteers clean heads to remove all the achenes, which are then counted to give us an accurate metric of echinacea plant fitness. There were a lot of heads from 2017, and volunteers continued to clean them through the summer
A bunch of undergraduate students have worked on projects in the lab this past year, including Emily, Emma, Leah, Julie (joining Team Echinacea 2019!), Tris, Sarah, and Evan. It’s always great to have undergrads in the lab – they learn a lot from us, and we learn a lot from them! Of course, graduate students were hard at work as well. Lea not only analyzed her data regarding seed set in Liatris and Solidago, but also set up a whole new experimental plot in California. Kristen, along with volunteer Mike Humphrey, is making a collection from the hundreds of bees she caught this summer in her yellow pan traps and emergence tents.
[STUART – add something here about papers that have been written/ are currently being reviewed by journals?]
Now on to the big part of this report – our super-productive 2018 field season! The 2018 summer team (pictured) included three undergraduate students from Minnesota Colleges (Andy, Brigid, and Riley), three undergraduates in the Ison Lab at the College of Wooster (Evan, Mia, and Zeke), two high-school students (Anna and Morgan), one high-school teacher (John), one graduate student (Kristen), two recent college grads (Michael and Will), and, of course, Stuart. Gretel and Amy also came to the field intermittently throughout the summer.
We summarized the progress we made on many summer projects this past year and made flog posts about the ones where considerable new progress was made. You’ll notice this part may look remarkably similar to previous years – we’ve been conducting many of these experiments for many years!
As always, we measured survival, growth, phenology, and flowering effort of our model plant, Echinacea angustifolia, in several experimental plots. The earliest was established in 1996 and the most recent in 2015. For many of these experiments it was business as usual, and if you’re interested in learning more about them we’ve linked to their background pages below. We spent quite a bit of time measuring plants in the qGen2 & qGen3 plot (exPt 8), and while many of the plants are doing well, we had almost 50% mortality from 2017 to now. In Amy Dykstra’s experiments, we continued to monitor plant survival and growth. While mortality is low, there are still no flowering plants!
Otherwise, here are new 2018 update flog posts about new data in the experiments that take place in our common garden experiments. Michael is currently working on a manuscript about the effects of pollen limitation in echinacea:
In addition to out common gardens, we make observations of Echinacea plants in natural prairie remnants in our study area. These observations include flowering phenology, survival, reproduction, and incidence of disease. Amy is currently investigating remnant flowering phenology for her PhD.
Echinacea angustifolia interacts with and shares space with many plant and insect species. Here are updates and flog posts about projects on species that are echinacea-adjacent. Kristen is using the data collected about pollinators on roadsides and ground nesting bees for her Master’s thesis. Andy found this year that aphids have virtually no effect on the fitness of echinacea plants. While no one this year is specifically looking at Hesperostipa, its worth noting that we did go out and check! We found only a few seeds, but collected them anyway.
Also, we have some new projects that don’t necessarily fit into any of the above categories. Here are updates of their projects.
And finally, we are worried about non-native Echinacea plants that are used in restorations and how they impact populations of the native Echinacea angustifolia. We have several ongoing experiments that investigate a population of Echinacea pallida introduced within our study area. Riley used the plants in P7 to gather data for his senior thesis at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Team Echinacea 2018 at exPt2. From left to right: Gretel, Amy, Will, Evan, Morgan, Zeke, Mia, John, Anna, Kristen, Andy, Brigid, Riley, Michael (Stuart took the photo)
In 2018, we collected data on the timing of flowering in 333 individual plants growing in our naturally occurring prairie remnants: 119 plants at Staffanson Preserve and 214 at others remnants. Flowering began on June 20th – four days earlier than last year. The last date of flowering was on August 9th – the latest bloomer was a roadside plant that had been mowed early in the season but put up another stem later in the season. Peak flowering for the remnants we observed in 2018 was on July 9th, which again was 4 days earlier than 2017. That day there were 257 individuals flowering. The figure below was generated with R package mateable, which was was developed by Team Echinacea to visualize and analyze phenology data. 
From 2014-2016, determining flowering phenology was a major focus of the summer fieldwork, with Team Echinacea tracking phenology in all plants in all of our remnant populations. Stuart began studying phenology in remnant populations in 1996, but he didn’t know that keeping track of the dates was called “phenology.” In following years, several students & interns also studied phenology in certain populations. The motivation behind this study is to understand how timing of flowering affects the reproductive opportunities and fitness of individuals in natural populations.
Start year: 1996
Location: roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and near Solem Township, MN
Overlaps with: Phenology in experimental plots, demography in the remnants, reproductive fitness in remnants
Physical specimens:
- Amy Waananen harvested some heads in fall 2018 and is germinating seeds right now at the U of MN. She is keeping track of which plant (mom) each seedling came from. She aims to use DNA fingerprinting techniques to identify the pollen donor (dad) of each seedling to get a sense of how far pollen moves in fragmented prairie habitat.
Data collected: We identify each plant with a numbered tag affixed to the base and give each head a colored twist tie, so that each head has a unique tag/twist-tie combination, or “head ID”, under which we store all phenology data. We monitor the flowering status of all flowering plants in the remnants, visiting at least once every three days (usually every two days) until all heads were done flowering to obtain start and end dates of flowering. We managed the data in the R project ‘aiisummer2018′ and will add it to the database of previous years’ remnant phenology records. Ask Amy Waananen for more specific data regarding phenology in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.
GPS points shot: We shot GPS points at all of the plants we monitored. The locations of plants this year will be aligned with previously recorded locations, and each will be given a unique identifier (‘AKA’). We will link this year’s phenology and survey records via the headID to AKA table. Ask Amy Waananen for more specific data regarding phenology in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.
You can find more information about phenology in the remnants and links to previous flog posts regarding this experiment at the background page for the experiment.
 A pallida head. Notice the white pollen, which is the only 100% sure way you can be sure a head is pallida and not angustifolia Echinacea pallida is an Echinacea species that is not native to Minnesota, but instead ranges East of the range of E angustifolia (and SE of our research site). In the summer of 2018, we identified 96 flowering E. pallida plants with over 200 heads that were planted in a restoration at Hegg Lake WMA. Every year for the past several years, we have visited the E. pallida plants, taken phenology data, and chopped off their heads. We do this to prevent E. pallida from being a bad pollen source or sink for native E. angustifolia populations. We were able to do this early this year, as E. pallida flowers significantly earlier than E. angustifolia.
We went back to check if we missed any heads on in September and found 3. They were done flowering, but hadn’t dropped seeds. We collected those heads, and they are currently stored at CBG. We hope that we might be able to germinate them for tissue. We want to analyze the ploidy of pallida compared to angustifolia. We have sneaking suspicions that pallida may be tetraploid where angustifolia is diploid.
Start year: 2011
Location: Hegg Lake Wildlife Management Area restoration
Overlaps with: Echinacea hybrids (exPt6, exPt7, exPt9), flowering phenology in remnants
Physical specimens: 200+ heads were cut from E. pallida plants and removed then composted. We brought three heads back with us to Chicago Botanic Garden.
Data collected: All pallida data is in demap
GPS points shot: We shot points for all flowering E. pallida plants.
Products: In Fall 2013, Aaron and Grace, externs from Carleton College, investigated hybridization potential by analyzing the phenology and seed set of Echinacea pallida and neighboring Echinacea angustifolia that Dayvis collected in summer 2013. They wrote a report of their study. Pallida counts are being somewhat incorporated into demap.
Previous team members who have worked on this project include: Nicholas Goldsmith (2011), Shona Sanford-Long (2012), Dayvis Blasini (2013), and Cam Shorb (2014)
You can find more information about Echinacea pallida flowering phenology and links to previous flog posts regarding this experiment at the background page for the experiment.
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