Thursday July 26th

Now that Team Echinacea has (finally!) finished measuring plants in CG1, we’ve started a couple of new activities. In the morning a group went into CG1 to place staples at locations where plants have not been found for the past three seasons. These staples help us to keep track of distance between plants when measuring.

In the afternoon, almost everyone went out to the North of Railroad and Railroad sites to work on demography. In brief, demography is a way to keep track of plants in the prairie remnants that Team Echinacea studies by finding and taking the GPS locations of flowering plants every year. By understanding how often plants flower and how often new plants flower for the first time, we can get a better idea of whether or not a population is stable.

As a Flog Post bonus, I’m including some haikus that I wrote yesterday morning when we were trapped indoors by the rain. I’ve written one about each Team Echinacea member’s project this year as well as several more general haikus about what we do. Enjoy!

The Echinacea Project Haikus.doc