TALL grass prairie vegetation

One obvious aspect of field research is that you cannot apply treatments or gather data if you cannot find your permanent plots. Now least you think TPP is careless or an amateur, several precautions were taken this spring, and in prior springs, to mark and map the 100 or so meter square plots out there on our research prairie. There is a permanent spike in the SE corner and smaller markers in the other corners, and in the late spring a 30" piece of white pvc pipe is pushed in over the spike.  Then in early summer 4-6' bamboo poles are placed within the pvc pipe with a bit of gaudy flagging on the top in those areas where the prairie vegetation is known to grow the tallest. TPP's September assessment is that tall grass prairie had a very good year; the vegetation is thick and tall, and even the bamboo poles are all but invisible. The tallest vegetation reaches 8-9 feet tall and it's solid up to 5-6 feet tall, so dense that TPP had difficulty even pushing through it. Armed with maps and familiarity and experience, it only took us 5 hours to find most of the plots and remark them so samples could be easily collected next week. It was exhausting work and at times my colleague was totally out of sight even though only a handful of meters away. These plants are all herbaceous perennials so all of that above ground biomass grows annually, and in this case on some very poor, low nutrient soil. Still you would have to experience such vegetation to truly appreciate just how amazing the prairie is this time of year.  And in case you wonder, very few short students have been lost in the course of our research. 

Making sense of a messy natural world

It's a mess out there!  Or perhaps more accurately, it's complicated out there. Nature involves interactions, and they are so diverse that as a biologist you begin to wonder if you can make any sense of it at all. So two projects are underway to see if some of this messiness can be sorted out. A couple of prairie plants are involved, one being studied by a student and one being studied by TPP and his colleague. In both cases the plants interact with animals in two different ways that together determine the reproductive success of the plant. Both plants require bee pollinators, primarily bumblebees, so plants in a patch sometimes get better pollination by living in proximity to other individuals who help make this a foraging patch that attract more pollinators and provide more pollen to each other. But at the same time, other insects feed on the flower buds, flowers, young fruits, and seeds, and perhaps growing in a patch allows such insects to find you more easily, and that which aids in pollination might be detrimental in terms of loss of flowers, fruits, and seeds. To make matters even more complicated, although not part of this study, our plant is a hemiparasite that requires plant hosts. As you may guess, you expect that perhaps there is an optimal clustering for reproduction, one that provides decent enough pollination but that does not overly expose the plant to the deprivations of other insects, and of course all of this may depend upon weather events and other factors as well. This is why evolution is necessary.  Organisms must be able to adapt to all of this change, this diverse mess of interactions. And if by chance you get any signal at all out of all of the back ground noise, you become quite convince that you have figured out something quite real about how all of this operates. Now multiply all of this by the number of species in the community, and you get some idea about how many interactions are taking place all the time. None of this operates in a clock-work manner, rather out of the whole emerges the appearance of organization. And then you see one more thing, something that you had never noticed before, and you begin to realize that you've just scratched the surface. One of the weevils that feed on the flower buds of this wild indigo are very cryptically colored and it had never occurred to TPP before that it had camouflage coloring. Even a small prairie patch has several lifetimes of things to study. Wait, isn't TPP retired? 

Scientific field work - equipment attrition

Field work is hard on both the researchers and the equipment. TPP's back is not getting any younger. One of the adventures each spring is to discover all of the "equipment" you and your students lost the previous year. Now please understand that the reason this becomes apparent each spring when your field site is a prairie is that hidden things appear after the prairie has been burned.  Now herein lies the real problem: lost items are now easy to find, but following a prairie burn, they may not be in primo condition any more. Last year was a tough year. Several wooden meter sticks were lost, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, countless pencils, ballpoint pens, although one still worked quite well (Yeah Bic), and permanent markers just went missing, as well as a couple of compasses that lost their way. Well, here's the compasses, a bit on the toasty

side, but still quite functional as paper weights or as specimens for demonstrating to students the consequences of carelessness while doing field work. Ah, well, plastic components have their limitations.

Tallgrass prairie not so tall this year

Yesterday was some planned maintenance work at our prairie research site.  The weather was just right for field work: hot and humid, sweltering, a word based on the root "swell".  It was a pretty simple job: find our research plots marked on their SW corner with white pvc pipe standing about 30" tall and stick in it a 5-6' bamboo stake with bright pink flagging on the upper end so we can find the plots later in the year.  In the late spring the poles seem quite absurd in their conspicuousness, but later in the season that changes even when the plot is covered with black 50% shade cloth.  See the difference from May to August?  In this case the treatment, removal of a hemiparasitic plant plus added fertilizer is having an effect (very positive on grasses).  Actually the late season plot isn't marked with a tall pole because this isn't one of the plots that's hard to find. Usually they are marked in early June, and by now it would be a problem with the vegetation at 5-6 feet tall.  But this year because of the draught only a few species were standing above 4 feet tall (compass plant, big blue stem, tall coreopsis).  Most of the prairie species looked fine, just shorter, and the flowering was mostly on schedule.  Unfortunately for the researchers, it isn't so much how tall the prairie is, but how dense the vegetation is, and it was dense, so it was hard to find our pvc pipes anyways, especially the one that was lying on the ground.  You see these research plots are not on some nice neat grid, but scattered around, and even after you sort of become familiar with the pattern, they can be hard to locate in the tall, dense vegetation.

Fall Field Work

After the summer lull field work begins again. Several students have projects that will require the team work approach to collecting data/plants/soil. A colleague wants to collect soil specimens from our long-term experimental plots, and that is always hard work. And we'll need to collect seed from some species for glasshouse experiments, and collecting data on an invasive species must be done for the depressing purpose of demonstrating the speed and extent of its spread. All these things must be done before 1. hunting season, and 2. a controlled fall burn. This makes for some fun because by now the prairie has reached it's full height, and even finding our plots can be tough, and then removing everything that could burn. Good thing one of the new students is tall; less chance of losing her. A few newbies will probably volunteer to give a hand with the field work just to see what field research entails and just to see the prairie. Regular nutritive rewards, particularly chocolate, keep things moving along. You know you just leave trails of little chocolate bars from plot to plot.

Prairie study site visit - August

Today was our first visit to our prairie study site in a month, and let me assure you that the hot, and now dry, weather has not had an adverse affect on the prairie. So let's start with our first task: finding our research plots. Now just in case you think us amateurs, the plots are quite well marked by 30 inch white pvc posts in one corner. In the tall portion of the prairie a bamboo pole was added raising the height to around 6 feet and orange plastic flagging was tied to the top, and in late May and early June that all seems over the top. But now it's August, some 5 months from when it was burned to the ground, and the change is most amazing. A dense canopy of vegetation is in places chest high, and the emergent grasses block your vision (see image) and forbs tower above my fingertips even when my arm is raised straight above my head. At one point we were within a foot of a plot and still could not see the pvc. Some helpful denizens of the prairie had chewed off most of the plastic flagging for reasons that seem quite unclear other than sheer perversity and at a distance of about 20 feet even my colleague was quite out of sight let alone trying to spot nice beige-colored bamboo poles. Even with our trusty map plots were hard to find, and the physical effort of just pushing through such dense tall vegetation was quite taxing; where are bison when you need some? But this is quite impressive vegetation really, and for people who have never seen such vegetation, and these days that is very few, it's quite a revelation that something so cool has been nearly destroyed by the John Deere legacy.

Spring at my Study Site

Spring, when a man's fancy turns to field work. And here's what a small portion of the Phactor's study site, a far corner actually, looks like in early spring. Nothing like a well-charred prairie to let you know it's going to be a good year for field work. The new transects won't be hard to find now, but last fall the stakes were quite well hidden by the tall grass vegetation. Finding a hundred or so individual plots only marked by a metal tag at the corner is another matter completely; hard when the prairie is burned, impossible when it isn't. This prairie will turn green very quickly, and the work will begin. Thank goodness for students and their nice young backs. This is a good place to break in those nice new white athletic shoes.

Mostly Unicellular

In Doug Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe the entry for Earth gets updated and revised based upon 15 years of field research from “harmless” to “mostly harmless” (also the title of his 5th book in this series), not a vast improvement, but probably helps with the publisher's liability issues. The Phactor thought he was the only person who could do so much field research and publish so little. When teaching about biological diversity even biology majors seem surprised by the idea that a dispassionate, unbiased evaluation of Earth’s biosphere could be summed up similarly as “mostly unicellular”. This is true although it does seem a bit ridiculous from our large organism point of view. People just cannot or will not come to grips with the idea that each and every one of us has more microorganisms living in and on us than we have cells in our body. Wonder how much the modern obsession with cleanliness and resulting germaphobia have contributed to this misconception, or is it simply that most people just don’t know how tiny and how numerous are the organisms that surround us?

Rainforest Field Trip - It's not nice to fool mother nature.

To study animal behavior sometimes requires some subterfuge. The reason for this is simple; organisms don't wish to cooperate with biologists, especially when we want them to hold still and wait for a predator. Now you might take the Jessica Lang/King Kong approach, but biologists are not cruel, generally, and besides if you took the wings off, it doesn't send the right signal. Another approach is to make a model, and digital photography and color printing make this easier than ever. Shortly after this model was deployed by one of our students, a group of tourists were seen clicking away, so at some level, she can be pretty sure the model works, but then again, are you more observant than a bird?

Someone noticed!

Wow! It's always a good feeling when someone out there reads your research, and understands its importance,and in this case, it's Notes from a Changing World. Thanks!

Experimental design

Field work is generally very time consuming, but for many of us that is our laboratory. This week the effort is to add a new wrinkle to a long term experiment. Central to all of this is a hemiparasitic plant, green and photosynthetic, but an obligate parasite on surrounding plants. So if parasitic, why be green; and if green, why be photosynthetic? Part of the answer is nutrients, particularly nitrogen, in a limited environment, which is what this hemiparasite obtains from its hosts. In the process it further limits their growth, but the additional light may improve its photosynthesis. So shade was added, nutrients were added, and the hemiparasite removed (several prior posts have bemoaned this treatment), and of course, all the possible combinations of these three treatments. After three years there have been changes, and now the invertebrate population is being sampled to see under what conditions their numbers, species diversity, and ecological roles have changed. Sounds like fun doesn't it? But sticky traps are a devil to deal with because they are really, really sticky. So soon an answer may be forthcoming. Predictions: the hemiparasite's presence with increase diversity; additional nutrients will reduce diversity. If only data weren't so hard to get, this would all be fun.

Lessons from field research

After a long week that which was lost is found, and lessons are learned. Let’s be honest, it just doesn’t sound professional to admit you can’t find your study plots even if events outside of your control rendered them nearly invisible in a tangled mass of prairie vegetation. This picture shows how easy the tags are to find when they have a big PVC pipe standing next to them after a burn. Now take away the PVC, let the vegetation grow for 40 days, then put it all under a bale of hay. Not so easy is it?
With a big investment in time, an average of 6 minutes per plot, all 108 plots have been found via a combination of luck, precision, persistence, and technology. And all of your outpouring of concern in the comments of my previous field research blog touched me greatly. But the field has a way of teaching you lessons about life. Nature isn’t there to do your bidding. Nature never cooperates, and if anything can go wrong, it will, so be prepared. All field researchers know these things, but if you actually told students the truth they never would elect to do field research. And then somebody questions you marginally significant data. The git! With all the noise out there, any reaction to your treatments at all is significant! The biggest lesson is that our best efforts to map plot locations are barely adequate and sometimes a bit of wandering in a favorable vicinity (Wasn't there a plot just about here?) and luck, aided by acute observations, provided a starting point to serve as an initial frame of reference. Even when you found a corner of a one meter square plot, it could be difficult to find the SW corner’s spike that actually provides the fixed reference point. So finding the next plot some 10 to 60 meters away remains quite a challenge. That’s the trouble with prairies, no obvious land marks. One the plus side, another lesson is that linear distances recorded in prior years were quite accurate, far more so than compass bearings, so if we had distances from two “found” plots to a missing plot it could be located sometimes to within an inch, or 8. Don’t know what that says about the Phactor’s low tech skill set, but if you want to know the distance from A to B, Robotape is a great device, sort of a laser tag with precision. How some things happen remains a mystery. Some plot tags had dug themselves in, buried beneath the soil, and without a metal detector they never would have been found, fire or not. And who knew so much lose change would be laying around a prairie just waiting to be found? Not! But the beeping kept us alert. Some plot tags had "crawled away", which made the corner spike even harder to find, but at least the spikes never wandered. Now on to the treatments which had to wait until the plots were found, and of all of these eradication is the worst.

Joys of Field Work - the most recent chapter

Fire is part of the ecology of grasslands although most residents of the prairie state do not know this because most of the prairie has been converted into the maize and soybean desert. For those of us who study some of the little patches of remaining prairie, fire is an important management tool because it keeps many invasive species, particularly woody plants, in check. So why the hell was my prairie not burned? The excuse was economics and personnel, not enough money, so not enough people to manage the burn. However, since the burning was scheduled the PVC posts that provide an early season marker for locating my study plots were removed leaving only an iron spike driven into the ground and an aluminum ID tag. Because of the particular experimental design these plots, 108 of them across a 6 acre area, were not laid out in a regular grid, but in random groupings of 9. Generally speaking after the fire these tags are not too difficult to find, and after locating 7 or 8 in each group, the remaining ones’ location(s) can then be triangulated. But the prairie was not burned so now all these tags are out there at ground level somewhere in a tangle of last year’s vegetation that easily reached 9-10 feet tall and this year’s new aerial shoots. Finding all the plots is proving next to impossible even with the help of a metal detector and maps of the groups. And metal detectors designed to find a cufflink on a fairway are not so easily used in the jungle of vegetation down there. Think this isn't costing some money and personnel time? Miss by an inch and you won’t see the tag. Oh, yes, the temptation to drop a match and blame it on a passing smoker was very strong.

What does the Phytophactor study?

Hmm, a curious reader has sent this query to the Phytophactor's mail bag. This is an easy question in the general, but it gets harder in the specific. Most generally, the Phactor's academic alter ego is a student of botany and science education whose publication record extends back into the mid-1970s. Mostly the research has concerned floral form and function, especially tropical flowers that employee beetles as pollinators. Floral development has also been a research area. Both have largely been done when time and money allow. In a lateral transfer of interest, one study of floral development led into a study of hemiparasitic plants (They're both green and parasites, which sort of makes you wonder, right?) in a prairie community, which is tricky because these plants interact on two different levels, and so far have proven far from cooperative. Things are complicated out their in the real world, and you have to wonder if neat little pot studies, using easy to grow weeds, so nice, so controlled, are actually telling us anything real. Without critters tearing or eating up your treatments, your data is probably too clean, too neat, too significant, and the real world sniffs at your error bars, and knows real science is done in the field. Beyond this general level the ideas, the hypotheses being tested, require a quite bit more in the way of explanation. Some studies deal with phylogenetic questions (lineages of common ancestry), some deal with adaptations and reproduction, and some deal with ecological ideas, so all are fundamentally evolutionary.

New Work Out Program Promises Data

Tone up! Firm up! Get healthy and contribute to the scientific enterprise!
Yes, here’s your exclusive opportunity to join the Phactor’s field work out crew and get the work out of your life while pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Tired of treadmills and stair-masters that quite frankly don’t get you anywhere? 30 mins of sweating and you’re still exactly where you started, well exercised, but no accomplishments whatsoever! And jogging! Talk about mind numbing!
My total field work out will fix all that! You can lug materials and supplies over hill and dale. You can trek back and forth from vehicle to study site until you drop. And on top of all of that my patented field work out will provide more deep knee bends than any comparable field research program.
BE READY FOR THE WORKOUT OF YOUR LIFE! 20 year old biology majors wilt, graduate students whine, and field work out has just gotten started! Wait until you get peppered mercilessly with ecological and botanical questions! Just wait until the data analysis begins! Just wait until the Phactor discovers you lost a critical specimen somewhere out on the endless prairie! Be the first to sign up for health and science! DO IT NOW!
The road to health and science travels through my study site, and the Phactor has a new research director’s chair he wants to try out.

Fall weather in Lincolnland

Ah, fall comes to colorful Lincolnland! The beautiful browns of soybeans and maize ready to harvest, the gray overcast skies, the rain drops on your windows and head, drab yellows of senescing leaves, and maybe the worst October weather ever! The first two weeks of October have some of the most reliably good weather here in Lincolnland. This information came from Peter Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, who had his staff conduct a survey of over 150 years of weather records. Peter used this data to schedule the Garden's annual systematic symposium because it also coincided with a time period when the gardens look very good. Oh, but this year the weather gods are getting even by teaching us about the law of averages. And of course, while all of the Phactor's students know that "it never rains on a field trip", it can often rain on your field research. So we are struggling to collect the specimens used for the data of an experimental prairie research project, and the only thing it hasn't done so far is snow. Hmm, yes, we got snowed on last year, but that was way into November, and the student, whose research project required this late season foray into the field, dutifully noted, "well, it didn't rain". So well put.

High tech field research

You hear so much about the high cost of technology to do research, and I wonder what all the fuss is about? Field season for the Phactor’s high tech research is just beginning (it never waits until the semester is over). So let’s see how the check list is going.

1. Find 100 one meter square quadrats after prairie has been burned. Check. Three “permanent” metal marker tags missing (par), all the locator spikes in place (wow!). Great! No careful work with high tech tape measures to find missing quadrats.

2. Eradication treatment. The prime subject of this research is a parasitic plant, so one of the treatments is to remove it from the nearly half the quadrats (less controls). Of course the plant also has to be eradicated from a 50 cm demilitarized zone around each quadrat, so the total area per quadrat is 4 meters square. So you get the idea, it’s sort of like removing a lot of dandelions from 200 square meters of a very weedy lawn. The cost of the high tech tool is not prohibitive, about $4 at any Ace Hardware.

3. Straighten back. Now that the Phactor thinks about it, his field research could be funded by the profits from converting his field work into an exercise video, “Weed your way to wellness”. Lose 10 lbs in 6 weeks and have publishable data to boot. Order yours now!

Field work - snapshots in ecological time

Only other field biologists can appreciate and sympathize with this problem. Studies done in the field cannot control for all the variations in nature, in particular normal variations in weather patterns, and so each study is actually a snapshot in ecological time. The trouble is that we try to extrapolate from these snapshots, and sometimes that doesn't work. And even worse you worry that the effects of weather can overwhelm your treatments.

The effort involved in field work makes the situation even worse. The steadfast effort involved in maintaining long term field studies is beyond most of us. For this reason I really admire Deborah and David Clark whose quarter century survey of tropical forest tree growth in Costa Rica is laudable just for its longevity, its contribution to understanding changes that may accompany global warming notwithstanding (Tropical rain forest tree growth and atmospheric
carbon dynamics linked to interannual temperature variation during 1984–2000. D. A. Clark, S. C. Piper, C. D. Keeling, and D. B. Clark. 2003. PNAS 100:5852-5857.). If you haven't read this paper and want to see good evidence of changes that accompany increases in carbon dioxide and temperature, I recommend it.

In just the 3d year of our field study on the effects of hemiparasitic plants on the prairie community, and already the year to year variation seems destined to swamp any treatment effects. Last year our plots had so many hemiparasite seedlings that we wondered if eradication was a feasible treatment. They just kept sprouting, and we just kept weeding. Those seeds were the product of the 2006 season. The spring of 2008 was very different. It was cold and wet, and this affected the number and/or activities of bumblebees because seeds of our hemiparasite are scarce even though it flowered like crazy. Last year I could collect seeds in huge numbers, nearly 250,000 in about 20 mins. But this year a similar investment in collecting produced a very small volume in comparison. Guess we won't have so many seedlings to remove next year.

But that's not all. Last year produced a bumper crop of seeds, but so far they have not been germinating like last year at all. In 2007 we could find hundreds per square meter, and this year when we decide to monitor seedling mortality, seedlings are hard to find. It makes for easier eradication, but is messing with out demographic study.

That's just how field work goes. And it's why those rare long term studies are so valuable. If we monitored pollination, and seed production, and seed germination for 25 or so years, we would probably understand many of the variables. But when something gives you a significant result, well, dang, you just know it's important and real because everything was working against you getting any results at all.