Chicago Botanic Garden Summer 2019

chicagobotanic.org 23 Since volunteer Lois Jackim joined the team in 2009, she has counted more than 900,000 seeds, and was dubbed the “Achene Queen” by the volunteer team in 2015. “ at day they had a crown for me and that was fun,” she recalled. She is working toward her goal of counting 1 million seeds. “It’s just nice to be a contributor to the end results,” she added. “Some volunteers are motivated to count a lot, and so they compete with themselves to reach counting goals,” said Wagenius. “Once we have a count, that measures the reproductive e ort of a plant, or the rst stage of tness.” e second stage is pollination. Volun- teers measure that by taking an X-ray of a random sample of fruits and then using the image to classify each fruit as full or empty—pollinated or not. “I consider myself very lucky to work with such a dedicated group of volun- teer citizen scientists. I think it’s good for them too. ey want to contrib- ute,” Wagenius said. Turner agrees. “ e social aspect—inter- acting with my fellow volunteers—is per- haps the fundamental component that leads to all the other enjoyable and inter- esting aspects; the science and the belief I am contributing to the growth of knowl- edge about the natural world,” she said. Wagenius began the Echinacea Project in 1995, funded by the National Sci- ence Foundation, which, he notes, ap- preciates the outreach component of the work and the engagement by citi- zen scientists who are also advocates for the prairie. Learn more chicagobotanic.org/volunteer echinaceaproject.org A team of dedicated volunteers at the Chicago Botanic Garden has counted millions of seeds to help understand why a prairie plant is struggling to survive. e volunteer team ushers the seed- heads through a series of steps from cleaning, counting, and weighing, to running them through an X-ray machine that reveals which owers were success- fully pollinated by bees. “ e experiments enable us to assess genetic e ects on plant tness. Out in the remnant populations, if a plant isn’t healthy, we don’t know why,” Dr. Wa- genius said. “We can’t tell if it’s because it has bad genes or herbivores are eating it or if it was sprayed by pesticide or grown in bad soil. But when we use the experimental approach, we can quanti- fy the big nature versus nurture—or genes versus environment—e ect on plant tness.” By studying the consequences of habi- tat fragmentation in tallgrass prairies, Wagenius and his team hope to bet- ter understand the biology, conser- vation, and restoration of plants and insects. Several volunteers have worked alongside Wagenius since the collab- orative process began. “We volunteers recall from time to time our rst task, which was to weigh the achenes (Echi- nacea seeds),” said Suzanne Turner, who celebrates her 20th anniversary as a Gar- den volunteer this year. “ e task took three of us volunteers sitting at the work bench with an ancient scale: one to pre- pare and record the seed, one to place the seed on the scale and announce the weight, one to record the result.” Over the years, the team has re ned techniques and technologies, and they now process up to 3,000 plant heads, counting more than a million fruits each year. ose seeds come from the narrow- leaved purple coneflower in scattered, small, remnant prairie patches as well as experimental plots in Douglas County, Minnesota, tracked by Stu- art Wagenius, Ph.D., se- nior scientist at the Chi- cago Botanic Garden, and his Echinacea Proj- ect eldwork team. Each summer, the research- ers gather s e e d - heads of Echinacea augus- tifolia to send to vol- unteers at the Garden, who in turn make precise estimates of how well the plants are pollinated in order to help understand the shrinking and frag- mented natural landscape for the cone owers.