Today was the first day of total demography! Team Echinacea started as a whole group at Tower, a remnant prairie site, where Jared gave an overview of total demography. Team Echinacea learned important skills such as communication and collaboration. After total demography was finished at Tower, one group headed to Martinson Approach and another went to East of Town Hall. Echinacea angustifolia pollen has seemed to wind down in the past few days. Today, Grace and Rebecca collected the remaining pollen from the last flowering plants. In the afternoon, everyone had personal project time!
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It’s heating up in western Minnesota! Temperatures and humidity were high today. In the morning, much of Team Echinacea performed the pollinator observations we learned about yesterday with Dr. Ison. These involved recording the pollinator with a camcorder, describing its activities, and attempting to ID to morphospecies level.  In the afternoon, emergence trapping crews had a great session of deployments and retrievals, while others worked on phenology in the common garden plots, and others gathered nectar. It’s exciting to see new species starting to bloom: two major species of prairie clover are just getting started, as is the wild bergamont and wild licorice.  Once everyone was back from the field, we enjoyed some ice cold watermelon and headed home. Another great day in the field! This week was a busy Monday for team Echinacea. Jennifer from College of Wooster joins us this week along with her research assistants Max and Indigo! This morning started off with round 2 of sweet clover pulling, and was promptly followed by a crash course in pollinator observations. We tried our hand in collecting species in small tubes for ID and then release. A big part of this was learning how to differentiate between flys and bees as some flies can look realllyyy close to a bee. But don’t be fooled! To round out the morning we went out in groups to collect pollen for our pollen and nectar study specifically looking at echinacea angustifolia. After lunch, half of us went and deployed another round of emergence traps while the other half went out and did nectar collection for the pollen and nectar study.  Maddie with round 2 of our sweet clover pulling bounty.  Jennifer prepping us for our crash course in pollinator observations.  Zach holding a micro-capillary tube with a whopping 7mm of nectar! Today the team conducted the second day of Stipa search. This time we came back to know points with Stipa plants using our visor and confirmed if a plant was present. The team learned how to differentiate basal Stipa plants from other grasses in the plot and confirmed the presence of many Stipa grasses that weren’t logged during our first day of Stipa search. In the afternoon the team worked on staking more BB points and collecting/setting up more emergence traps. Today was a busy Friday full of many activities! It is officially the first day of summer! Ning, Liam, and Maddie worked in P1 today fixing flags that might be out of place or not in line and also putting signs for positions so it is easier to know where you are. They also checked the flags in the 99 garden. Zach and Emma headed out to P8, where they watered the prairie turnips planted yesterday and planted extra plants. An interesting thing they noticed was that the prairie turnips seemed eaten across the first 3 rows. The team hypothesized that it might be hungry rodent. Ian helped Elise learn how to use the GPS and how to shoot some BB points. At lunch, the team had a discussion about their ABTs (And, But, So), which are goals for what each person wants to research or study further this year. There were many great ideas and lots of feedback in our discussion. In the afternoon, Liam and Zach shot some more BB points. Ian, Maddie, Elise, and Emma and placed some more emergence traps!  Zach with an emergence trap placed yesterday(6/20/2024) Today was a full day for team Echinacea! Not only is it Elise’s first day on the team, but it’s also summer solstice. This morning Brittany and I went out to Staffanson Prairie Preserve West to finish shooting bb-points. While another team started flagging/planting P8 for a new experiment. The new common garden experiment being added to P8 involves planting prairie turnip to learn how to grow and measure the species while establishing a basis for future studies. Many more updates to come, along with daily posts from other members of the team.  Hailey (left) and Maddie (right) flagging in P8.  Wyatt (left) and Elise (right) standing with some prairie turnip plugs.  Brittany (left) and Emma (right) planting some turnips in P8. This week I worked on scanning, randomizing and counting for P01-nat. The batch is now entirely scanned, and the images are up on the ACE website for counting! The other volunteers and I have completed 26.2% of counting as of the end of the day today. We are half done with the randomizing for the batch, and I am hoping to have that step of the process completed by the end of next week. Today I was also trained in how to prepare sheets for x-ray (end result of that process pictured below in Image 1), and I should be completing that process with P01-nat within the next couple of weeks! I have also included a picture of the end result of the rechecking process, which I detailed in my post last week (Image 2).    Today, while deploying emergence traps, we avenged our recently stung colleague (Ellysa Johnson). One of our randomly selected points was directly upon a hornets nest (a few are seen in this photo, but tens were present and buzzing furiously). Miraculously, neither of the crew members present were stung. Let this day mark our revenge.  Also we did demo. Ritualistic randomizer A machine of the organizer Shake up the pairing Instead of despairing Stale routine? Revitalize her!    In this episode of a day we started off testing out Jared’s protocols for micro habitats. We gathered data like soil compaction, light availability and litter depth from random test points. We had lots of success and even more discoveries on how to make things run smoother. Tomorrow we will put the newly revised protocol to the test in the first official episode of micro habitats! |
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