The Echinacea Project Field Log

Nicholas Goldsmith's Project Proposal

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:10:55 -0600

Attached my summer project proposal in pdf format

Halverson Data, Head harvesting, and Landfill species list (in progress)

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:09:22 -0600

DATA

Here is a copy of my excel file with all my data. The sheet labeled corrected data for analysis is the file with all the data for each treatment. The sheet labeled baggins has a list of all the heads I used that need to be harvested, this was also posted in a separate post called "Baggins." The ones labeled "donor" do not need to be harvested but should not be expected to have high seed set as they were bagged for most of their flowering time.

Pollination interference data (data entry 2).xls

HARVESTING

I need all of the heads used in my project (the ones that are painted) to be harvested in egg cartons (located in the shelf above the sink in the Hjelm house). Please label the compartment of the egg carton with the row, pos and tt color of the head. The egg cartons should be packed so that they wont be disturbed during travel and please be careful with the heads so no seeds fall out! Gretel has a list of all the heads to be harvested and its posted on the flog in July ("Baggins"). Please mail the packaged heads to: 119 School Street, Keene, NH 03431

LANDFILL SPECIES

I have been collecting plants at Landfill this season and have started to compile a list of the plants I have either seen or collected there. If Megan and anyone else would like to add plants to that list that would be great! Or check my identification. This list is very rough at the moment but I will continue to update it as I get more plants identified.

Species list landfill 2009.xls

Allegra's pollination data .csv file

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:36:15 -0600

Here is my dataset that I am working on analyzing in R as a .csv file.

halverson.data.091.csv

Stuart, here is my R script so far:

halverson.data.analysis1.R

I made new columns in the .csv spreadsheet for the factors and levels we discussed. I will work on a list of hypotheses to test. I think I changed the definition of "y" when I did my 24 hour analysis. Can I give "y" a different name for each analysis? Or does the code need to read a defined "y" each time?

Thanks for the help and check out the graph of 24 hours and the summary m2.

Allegra

shrivel data

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:45:40 -0600

Here's a snippet of R code showing how to extract info from the shrivel character data (a file is below...

df <- data.frame(shrivel.txt =c("x", "xoxx", "xxxx", "oooo", "xoooo"))
df      # start off with this data frame
str(df)

df$shrivel.count <- nchar(as.character(df$shrivel.txt)) #add column

vx <- gsub("o", "", df$shrivel.txt)  # replace o with ""
vx
df$shrivel.xs <- nchar(vx)           # make a new column in df

vo <- gsub("x", "", df$shrivel.txt)  # replace x with ""
vo
df$shrivel.os <- nchar(vo)           # make a new column in df

str(df)
df      # final data frame

codeForAllegra.r

Pressed plants and painted bracts

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:35:38 -0600

Here's a photo of the box I built for drying plants with generously donated materials from the Wagenius family.

A pressed specimen of Anemone canadensis collected at Hegg Lake with Greg.

One of my painted heads after being repainted this week. Each paint color identifies a pollen treatment.

Thanks to Mimi for letting me use her camera!

Baggins

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:41:01 -0600

Here is a list of the plants I used in the common garden for my experiment on pollen interference/competition. I used 20 randomly selected plants in the 96 garden with 12 pollination treatments on each plant. The heads I harvested are also included in this spreadsheet, but here they are again: 39 952 blu and wht heads were harvested on 7/24/09.

Baggins.CG.09.xls

The preliminary results seem to show that the only treatments that consistently did not shrivel were:
silver-the control, no pollinations
white-Carduus acanthoides pollen only (thistle)
pink-Coreopsis palmata pollen only

All of the treatments that received echinacea pollen (either am or pm) showed somewhat consistent shriveling.... will it hold up to the stats.... we will see!

the most interesting treatment is.....
purple-Heliopsis helianthoides pollen only- this one had a mix of results, which may be due to differences in the amount of pollen arriving on the styles or some other factor. but it certainly did not show consistent style persistence. hmmmmm.....

Just as a reminder, style shriveling indicates that compatible Echinacea pollen has arrived on a style, and can be a good predictor of seed set. Style persistence indicates that compatible pollen has not landed on a style. In the case of some of my treatments which had both Echinacea pollen and another type of pollen, shriveling may not indicate seed set. This will be tested by dissecting the heads and weighing the seeds later this year.

More results to come soon...

I need helpers for my project too!

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:55:49 -0600

Stuart, here are the estimates of people hours I will need for my project. Also, a schedule of times when I would need helpers during this week. Who wants to trade some hours?

Monday I would ideally like to paint and count styles for up to 80 treatments which I estimate will take 9-10 people hours (depending on how many need to be trained). I would like to do it after phenology or at least do the style persistence before lunch, painting can happen later. Wednesday and Thursday also follow the same schedule.

But... this would mean a big pollination day on Tuesday, when everyone is out in the remnants. Pollination takes about the same amount of time. So Mimi and I have come up with several possible solutions (or a combination):
- If Ruth will be here Tues. morning she could help collecting insects and someone else could help pollinate
- Cut the remnants down to 9 instead of 10
- Have some people in smaller remnants leave a little earlier than 11am, or have vehicles and be able to book it back at 11 to help pollinate from 11-12
- Cut down the treatments painted on Monday, however I don't want to cut down too much, since some of my plants have been flowering since Thursday or Friday and I don't want to wait too long
- Skip painting on Monday, paint Tuesday and Thursday, and pollinate Wed. and Friday when we have more people to spare

- I would also like help collecting pollen on Tues. and Wed. but I may be able to do this myself if needed.
- lastly, I need one person to help me do afternoon pollination on Tuesday and Thursday between 2-4pm

Sorry for throwing this into the mix so late in the game folks. I guess it was just hard to know how many hours and people I would need before we did a full day of painting and pollinating.

-Allegra

Bike gang and project progress

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:00:30 -0600

My project is almost ready to start this week!

I will be hand pollinating heads on 20 flowering plants in the '96 section of the CG with different species of foreign pollen and Echinacea pollen to simulate pollen loads arriving from generalist pollinators. The Echinacea pollen will be applied at the same time as the foreign pollen, 4 hours after, or not at all depending on the treatment. I should start painting bracts for the first flowers in the next couple of days. After discussing the pros and cons of different pollinator exclusion methods, I have decided I will use bags for the 20 plants in my study, and cages for the plants I will be taking pollen from frequently. All my plants now have blue flags in the CG. Ruth brought new paint for us to use, including a lovely new dark purple color. Thanks Ruth!

I have also decided to use 3 different foreign pollen donors and no mixes for my treatments. After some practicing collecting pollen from different species at the Landfill, here are the best species I have come up with that have easy to collect pollen:
Lead plant-Amorpha canescens-Fabaceae
False sunflower-Heliopsis helianthoides-Asteraceae
These are both common in the remnants and co-flower with Echinacea, hopefully sharing pollinators.

Other possibilities:
Coreopsis palmata-Asteraceae
Thistle-whichever is in flower?-Asteraceae
Prairie anemone-Anomone sp.-Ranunculaceae

Also, the bike gang is now 7 deep, so K-town betta watchout!

Allegra

Allegra's options

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:27:19 -0600

Here's a file with plants that Allegra can use for her pollen interference/precedence experiment. These are all plants identified yesterday as going to flower in 2009. Plants are sorted according to priority order--random, except that plants from site of origin "Unknown" are given priority 1.

I recommend going down the list and excluding all plants that don't have at least two promising heads. Flag all included plants with labels 1, 2, 3, .... Stop when you have enough for your experiment. Ask Gretel which color flag to use. Blue is an option because your plants are in CG96 and Andrea's are in CG97.

First week, seedling search procedures, and project proposal

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:07:43 -0600

My name is Allegra Halverson and I am from New Hampshire. I am an undergraduate student in Botanical Science at McGill University in Montreal, and a recent addition to Team Echinacea. Lots of things happened this week, so here are a few highlights:

We moved into the old town hall and I've been loving the bike ride to the farm in the mornings so everyone with access to a bike should bring it!

I saw a garter snake, two frogs, two deer, ground squirrels, a wild turkey and lots of birds.

Gretel and I selfed Megan J's prairie turnip plants at the landfill site on Wednesday. We also helped Andrea put out flags and fungal traps in the CG for her mycorrhizae project.

I started my plant collection at the landfill and common garden with 15 plants so far. I have to make a plant collection for a class next winter and will also make one for the Echinacea project at the same time to help future newbies with plant identification.

During this first week we received a lot of background information on the project and began the planning stages of our own projects related to the larger questions about Echinacea in the fragmented prairie habitat. Several projects surrounding the question of competition for pollinators were chosen along with pollen identification projects and one project about the aphids. My project will focus on how inter-specific pollen landing on Echinacea flowers effects style persistence. pollen competition proposal.doc

We developed a new key for the labeling seedling search maps:
-each plant in the circle has a dot with line drawn to the center and the distance (cm) to the focal plant written on the line

s with a circle around it: a seedling
B with a circle around it: a basal plant, not flowering
* with a circle around it: a flowering plant, should have a metal tag like this 7819.2 (.2 is the number of flowering heads)
N with a circle around it: a nail with a metal tag on it

any plot with a plant found in it, other than the focal plant, had a map made for it.
any plot with a seedling found in it was photographed and a pencil marker with a letter (for basal or seedlings) or number (for numbered plants) was placed 2 cm west of all plants
a toothpick was placed 5 cm from the seedling towards the focal plant

am i missing anything?