During the summer of 2017, Lea and I carried out a project we called “Rich Hood” (richness of floral neighborhoods). This involved setting up 2 x 2 m square plots around Echinacea plants in the remnants, and getting cover class estimations for all species present. We also harvested flowering Echinacea heads, and there is more specific information in the flog post about reproductive fitness in the remnants. Nina Denne, a student at Carleton, completed an externship project comparing the floral neighborhood with the seed set of the collected Echinacea heads.
On May 6th and May 7th, 2018, I returned achenes to the remnants that were not sampled for the x-ray. I returned achenes to all the remnants that were in our study except for Landfill and SPP, which will hopefully be rematriated later this spring. At each site, I staked to points where heads had been collected (using stake file stakeReturnRichHood.csv), found the matching tags within the plot, and spread achenes in about a 20 cm radius around last year’s stalk. In some cases, if I couldn’t find the tag within a reasonable time of searching, I spread the achenes around the point I staked to.
It was nice to see what the remnants looked like in the spring, but I didn’t see any tiny Echinacea rosettes yet. Some of last year’s heads out there had dispersed all of their achenes, but many were still holding on to a few.
An Echinacea head with a few achenes left to disperse.
Leave a Reply