Firstly, does anyone have a good acronym for this experiment? I tried PONS but don’t really like it.
Also, I wrote up a list of what each person needs for next week’s endeavors. If I’ve estimated times correctly, we need 9 people to do pollinator observations, 3-4 ppl for FNC (but the more the merrier), and 3-4 people for flagging plants beforehand (again the more the better) :ech PONS equip list.doc
What we still need :
>Ice packs (9)
>lunchbox coolers (6) I found 3 total but maybe there are more roaming around?
>stopwatch (1)–Greg offered to bring a couple back from his school for next week.Thanks Candyman!
9 possible remnants have been chosen (based on size of flowering plant populations in 2004 & 2005) and the back ups as well so here they are:
Staffanson, Landfill, North of Railroad crossing, LCW, NW Landfill, Riley, Yellow Orchid Hill, Steven’s approach, Nessman. Back ups: East Riley, EELR?, Railrd crossing
Hopefully Friday pm or Monday pm we can drive around to these sites and assess the abundance of flowering Echinacea plants, and also get a good understanding of what may be co-flowering with Echinacea next week. We will need to be flexible…if there aren’t enough plants flowering, then we will have to push the experiment back, and our second round later in the summer will have to be less than 2 weeks apart from the 1st round as we had originally planned.
A recent addition to our project is the potential to assess reproductive success using the style persistence method since it will be very valuable data and we are going to be collecting styles anyway for Kate.
We need to finalize protocols (I will try to post mine asap), figure out how to randomly select fl. plants in Staffanson and Landfill, the largest remnants, and I need to do some more practice runs of FNC with the newly made forms that Gretel helped me with today. We also will hopefully be able to do some practice runs of insect collecting this Friday with beemaster Amanda. I think field season is starting to get into full swing.
Thank you to everyone who has helped thus far with suggestions and advice. It has truly been appreciated.
Sheesh! I think we are going to need Sherpas to schlep around all that gear!