Pretty prairie perks

Conducting prairie research does have a few perks.  It's still pretty early out on the prairie, and not too much is going on in terms of flowering, but the prairie does have a few spring ephemerals, plants that sprout early and flower before the canopy closes over them. In this case the canopy is only about 2 meters, but if you only have a rosette of leaves, that's plenty tall. These shooting stars, Dodecatheon meadia (Primrose family), are among everyone's favorite plants because of their nifty looking flowers that can range across quite an range of colors from almost white to quite fuchsia. This is one of the densest patches TPP knows. 

Another plant that favors patches is the wild hyacinth, Camassia scilloides (lily family).  Many people never see these because they don't venture out into the prairie until much later in the year. If TPP doesn't get out there just after it has been burned, the permanent plots would never be found (and if truth be told, a few are still missing and that effort is waiting until the semester ends). 

Biodiversity in the maize and soybean desert

TPP has long joked about living in the maize and soybean desert of the upper midwest. Sadly this does a grave injustice to deserts because even the harshest desert has more biodiversity than our agricultural fields. 200 years ago this was tall grass prairie which has a surprising and substantial biodiversity and this same grassland community built some of the richest soil in the world. Here in Lincolnland the tall grass prairie is all but gone, less than 1% remains, and it was largely displaced by maize, and later soybeans. In a photoessay of the world's biodiversity, David Liittschwager would document all the biodiversity in a one-cubic foot volume found in a day. In a Costa Rican rain forest, 150 different species were found in his one-cubic-foot placed in the canopy of a strangler fig tree. And all over the world he found surprising biodiversity, and it's mostly surprising because humans pay very little attention to the little organisms. But in a maize field here in north central Lincolnland he got quite a different surprise. Sadly, he found nothing, nothing but maize. In our zeal, in our passion, in our desire for maize, our agricultural methods have come as close as possible to creating a complete monoculture. It's no wonder that more wildlife lives in our cities and towns than outside the city limits because out there it's a biological wasteland, except for crops.  This represents nature bent entirely to human will, and again because little attention is paid to this, it's been estimated based on measurements here and there, that half of this marvelous prairie soil is gone, and so is the community that made it. So how smart are humans anyways? Do you need a crystal ball to see what the future may bring?

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. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - dwarf gentian

Yesterday TPP took a field trip to Don's prairie out in the

middle of the maize and soybean desert.  Don has a hobby and for the past few decades it has been restoring prairie on his family's farm land.  He keeps great records and took a most methodical approach, very professional in all respects, and very simply he has 15-16 acres of the best restored prairie TPP has ever seen. Wow, his efforts are impressive!  At any rate one of the flowering gems of tall grass prairies are gentians.  They flower in the late fall way down there in the deep fall grass.  Don had both bottle and prairie gentians, but he also has the very uncommon dwarf gentian (Gentianella quinquefolia).  Isn't this a great plant?  TPP has seen this once before on a little prairie remnant much west of Don's place.  It's great when just regular people get such a fantastic conservation ethic that they just decide to restore native habitat and communities.  However, he has no plans to introduce bison anytime soon. 

Hot, humid summer field work

Humidty on our prairie study site was about 300% (based on how it felt) this morning especially down in the vegetation where we had little seedling plots to photograph.  The emergent vegetation, e.g., compass plant, is already about 6 feet tall and getting ready to flower.  The grasses will wait until later to shoot upward for flowering.  Quite different from the stunted growth of last year's heat and drought.  This area has had rain for the past few days so the plants can transpire a lot, and that makes the humity down in the vegetation as high as it can get.  And as the morning wore on, the heat rose, and you just became soaked in sweat.  Now the only complaint here is that when you're trying to see things, bending over, you keep getting sweat on the lens of your glasses, and that's really annoying.  The other problem is the prairie vegetation has lots of rough edges, and wearing short sleeves for comfort, your arms get quite scratched from pawing through the leaves searching for your well marked plots that nonetheless are hard to find.  It's not just sedges that have edges.  In compensation it's a nice meadow of flowers this time of year, fleabane asters, yarrow, wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium, shown with beetle floral

visitor), cone flowers purple and pale, pinks, black-eyed susans, sunflowers, lead plant.  Tomorrow morning will be a repeat.

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.

Field work commences

Although a stack of exams awaits, field work begins this afternoon.  The prolonged early warmth of spring 2012 has moved up our field work schedule by at least 3 weeks.  And you cannot just decide to wait until later.  In this sense field work domineers your life; your needs and wants are subordinated to those of your research organism.  The prairie lousewort is one of the 1st plants up on the prairie, seen here emerging after a burn, next to a partially melted marker, inflorescence already formed and ready to go.  Fortunately some young backs have decided to get involved in our research, and their assistance will be most welcome.  When studying rain forest trees, one of my student field assistants was afraid of heights and would not climb a ladder.  With prairie field work operating down at ground level one of the students is a pole vaulter!  As usual our first act is to find all of our research plots, and although marked by a permanent metal tag and corner spikes, and although mapped, it's amazing how tough it is to find some of them even after a vegetation clearing burn.  In full vegetation finding the plots is next to impossible.  Every now and then something pulls a tag out making things really difficult.  However, only one plot has been totally lost, misplaced if you will, since 2006, and fortunately it was a second control so we can operate without it.  In particular my collaborator has lost many pens and several pairs of sunglasses, and some of them do get found.  Last year this was quite an experience because several large Nerodia (water snakes) were emerging from dens and sunning themselves, and giving my snake nervous colleague quite a bad startle.  This will not be brought up, as bad field episodes are best forgotten.  

Field Work - Invasive Species

One of my study sites is a restored prairie, a particularly high quality one, but a bit small. Now this little prairie is being treatened by an invasive species, silky bush clover, an Asian relative of native bush clover. It's one of those things where the focus of your research was elsewhere, and when you finally become of aware of what is happening, it's too late. This week's field work, and probably next week too, will be to harvest the silky bush clover from our long term research quadrats to document its continued invasion and increasing density. How dismal. Because this invasive species is so well adapted to the prairie environment, no obvious mechanism exists for its removal, and this isn't just one or two plants here or there. So like good scientists the demise of this prairie will be recorded; it served us well for quite a number of years, but in another decade it will be quite a different plant community, one with dense stands of the clover, much lower species diversity, with some of the taller forbs, and the grasses persisting. Here's a view across a patch of silky bush clover and notice that you don't see much else except way back some grases mark the back edge.

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.

Watching the prairie disappear

Here's a very nifty graphic that shows the spread of agriculture and the increasing intensity of agricultural land use over the last 300 years. If you get your eye on Lake Michigan in North America watch as the prairie to the south and west gradually turns yellow as it disappears. Here in Lincolnland less than 1% of the original prairie has survived thanks to John Deere. As human demands have increased, it has come at the cost of natural communities. Nothing mysterious at all. HT to the Scientist Gardener.

Prairie field work - spring version

Cities and towns are nice little microhabitats, and this is never more obvious than when you drive 10 miles or so out of town to do prairie field work early in the season. Yes, this is the same place that had highs in the 80s last week, and snow flurries this week. It didn't seem too bad walking home, so out to the field we go, and what a difference! Yes, with a stiff breeze providing a pretty substantial wind chill a couple of hours on the prairie was quite bracing. This is the reason those wind turbines are sprouting up all over; the wind is always blowing. Fingers and toes still feel a bit stiff. Next up will be our annual permanent plot hunt! The fun never ends.

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.