pollen viability and identifying distinct plants in the recruitment expt (I)

I was glad to participate in assessing floral phenology Wed morning and, with Amy, checking to resolve uncertainties remaining from this year’s monitoring of the first recruitment experiment (not to mention a very fun lunch with the team!). We sampled tissue from closely neighboring rosettes, where it isn’t clear whether they are the same or different plants, for eventual molecular analysis in Chicago by Jennifer and her team. Resolution of those plant identities should certainly help reduce the problem of counts of survivors *increasing* between censuses. But, in retrospect, I wondered whether the info we recorded was crystal-clear in terms of how this year’s counts should be adjusted, depending on the outcome of the IDing, particularly for the zones where many seedlings were recorded. When the remaining double-checking is done, it would be good to keep this in mind…

Of the many, many other terrific things that I’m excited are being accomplished, I’ll just comment that I’m happy to see Megan’s post that she has sampled pollen and stored it in different conditions to check its long-term viability. Finding a way to keep pollen viable for a month to a year would pave the way for experiments I thought up while observing pollinators out at LF on July 7. I see that Megan noted the amount of pollen available for that sample wasn’t large, so it would be great if another set of samples could be taken, also so other plants are represented.