Winchell Conference 2019: Sarah and Julie’s Liatris and Solidago

To take a quick break from all the posts about MEEC 2019, here’s members of Team Echinacea presenting somewhere completely different! Like Tris, Julie and Sarah joined Team Echinacea in November as part of the Carleton extern program. While here, they worked with Lea on her work on Liatris and Solidago, using many of the ACE techinques that we normally reserve for Echinacea. Specifically, Sarah and Julie are looking at how fire at Staffanson Prairie Preserve effects the flowering and seed set of the various Asteraceae there.

Much like Lea is finding in her modelling of these two species, Liatris has a fairly strong interaction with fire, while solidago does not seem to have any interaction. The mechanisms behaind this a certainly still unclear. Julie and Sarah presented these findings at the Winchell Conference – a conference for undergraduate research at their home institution – Carleton College.