Funding and Field Day

Oh man has it been a busy week.

The meeting with the Syngenta folks went really well.  It's always nice to get an outsider's perspective with these things, and the two guys who came down were full of helpful suggestions and provoking questions.

Also, they agreed that the whole thing was money well spent.  Phew.

Since that meeting last Wednesday, I've also been busy collecting the bee bowls I put out last week, doing some wildflower species-specific pollinator collections, and speaking at the annual Turfgrass Field Day put on by my university's Plant and Soil Science Department.

I love Field Day.  I really, really love Field Day.  I get to speak to a ton of people, most of whom actually want to be there, on a topic I'm wild about.  Several hundred laypeople show up to this event to get their CEUs (Continuing Education Credits) so that they can continue to commercially spray herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers and run their horticulture/turf based businesses:  nurseries, landscapers, lawn care applicators, etc.  My lab always participates by running one of the "tours" where we talk about current issues in turfgrass management and our own research.  It's refreshing to speak to people who are excited about the practical applications of my research and rarely question my methodology, statistical analysis, or whether I really think the literature supports my leading hypothesis.  Academics.  Whattayagonnado?

And did I mention it's outside?  It's outside.  Field Day is a beautiful thing.

And did I mention they feed us?  They feed us.  They even provided Boca burgers for us vegetarians.  Field Day is a beautiful thing.

Here's my lab, all pumped up and happy to be talking to these folks.  We talked for about one hour collectively, though each individual's presentation varied in length.  I was feeling chatty and excited, so I might have taken a little bit more time than the rest of the group...

I've got to cure myself of this.  I talk with my hands.  I look like a wimpy velociraptor.  

And we were lucky enough to do the tour right in front of my Operation Pollinator plots, so extra publicity for me!

I love how enthusiastically people respond to these presentations.  I did two interviews on the spot--one for Turfnet.com, the other for the Plant and Soil Sciences web designer.  I'll link to them if they ever are published.

The whole thing turned out to be totally worth the wicked sunburn I picked up on the backs of my legs.

Though not by much.  Sunburns are the worst.  Especially in the crinkly part of your knees.

On meeting with the folks funding my research

I'm always nervous.  Always.  Before each of these meetings, I convince myself that they're going to withdraw my funding and I'm going to have no more money and all my paychecks will have to go to PVC and grass herbicides and I'll have to eat ramen and stale bread for the next year and a half.

So I'm having one of these meetings tomorrow afternoon.

Here's the thing:  I actually really like the Syngenta turfgrass representative that oversees my Operation Pollinator project.  He's consistently super-pleasant, and everyone he brings with him to check up on my work has always been helpful and engaging.  This time he's bringing the manager of their Lawn & Garden Research Development staff with him.  They're interested in setting up their own OP plots in Wisconsin based on the work/methodology that I've already developed.

So I'm nervous.

Big day tomorrow.  Plus, I'm putting out my first round of bee bowls tomorrow morning, which I'm super excited about, even if it does add an extra dose of time-crunchy stress to tomorrow.

On being a semi-reluctant weekend researcher

This last weekend, while millions of Americans were enjoying the beautiful outdoors in a pleasant, relaxing way via farmers' markets, minor league baseball games, and walking their cats (or at least, this is what my overheated, slightly grumpy brain was telling me), I spent mine tending the Operation Pollinator sites.

Not that I don't love my OP sites.

I just don't love them quite as much on Saturday mornings.

Fortunately I had a helper this time around.  I had to bribe Boyfriend out of bed and into the field with the promise of Waffle House, and even then it was a tough sell.

Here he is.  High point of the morning.  Epitome of happiness, because he knows waffles are on the way.

Later, a barely-disguised look of total disgust.  The waffle-induced euphoria has passed.  What is he doing with his life?

We spent Saturday prepping my sites for the bee bowls which will go out later this week for the first sampling set EVER for Operation Pollinator.  A bee bowl is a passive way to collect pollinators (not just bees!).  It is usually a brightly colored bowl (often in fluorescent yellow or blue) filled with soapy water, which has a much lower surface tension than regular water.  Pollinators are attracted to the color, and fall to their doom in the soapy water, where I collect them after the bowl has been out in the sun for a few hours.

Most bee bowls are just set on the ground, but I am elevating mine so that they are at the approximate level of the wildflower bloom, which is also where the pollinators are.  In order to elevate these suckers, I've made a relatively simple contraption, mostly consisting of PVC pipe and gorilla glue, which should be mobile and easily removable from the site when I'm not actively sampling.

It looks like this:

My Paint skills leave something to be desired.

More to the point--you see that purple/brown bar at the bottom of the elevated bee bowl?  That's supposed to represent an 18 inch piece of half inch diameter rebar.  You see how it's 6 to 8 inches in the ground (this should be obvious, given the precision with which this diagram was constructed)?

Yeah.  That's what we were doing.

The tools of the trade:

We pounded the hell out of that rebar.  We showed it who was boss.  And we put in eight rebar stakes at six different sites.

The end product:

Aw yeah.  Rebar never even knew what hit it.

It was me.  With a sledge hammer.

Before/After Shots

This is cool.  Thought I'd share.

Same site, same weather.  8 months apart.

September:

Early May:

Yesterday!

Awesome!  Thank you, warm May!  Now rain!

What is Operation Pollinator?

Operation Pollinator is a program which started in the United Kingdom in 2010 and which is funded by Syngenta.  The purpose of the program is to create native wildflower banks on golf courses, which could then serve as sources of pollen and nectar sources and refuges for native pollinators and other beneficial insects, such as parasitoids and predators.  Several hundred golf courses are currently participating in Great Britain.

Most golf courses, while quite aesthetically pleasing, are fairly barren of plant, insect, and vertebrate biodiversity for two basic reasons:

First, it takes a very high input level to maintain the aesthetic charm and faultless playing surfaces of traditional golf courses.  These high inputs often take the form of:

• Fertilizers
• Irrigation
• Herbicides
• Fungicides
• Pesticides
• Mowing

Together, these inputs create not only a heavy economic burden, but also a heavy environmental burden.  It is very difficult for wildlife to continue to live on golf courses due to their populations' constant displacement, whether chemical or physical.

Second, there is very little variation in the landscape of traditional golf courses.  It's pretty much the same two or three species of turfgrass, cut at rough height, collar height, or putting green height.  Aside from a handful of ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowering annuals, that's it.  The near complete lack of architectural and plant species diversity severely limits the species diversity of arthropods which can live on golf courses.

Operation Pollinator will hopefully help to change that.  We have pioneered the first branch of Operation Pollinator for turf systems in the United States.  We began this project in September 2011, and over the next several seasons we will be evaluating the three wildflower seed mixes we developed for this project--both for appropriateness to the landscape and to native pollinators.  By the end of the project, I hope to have created a single appropriate seed mixture which can then be used by golf course superintendents over a large part of the Midwest and South to beautify and their golf courses while also creating refuges for our struggling native pollinators (and creating areas that don't need fertilizer, mowing, irrigation, pesticides, etc.).

Besides, who wouldn't rather look at this...

than this?

There are several other trends towards increasing the habitat complexity of golf courses, and therefore increasing populations of beneficial insects, but I'll talk more about that at some other time.

BzzzBzzz, Operation Pollinator is blooming!

So, today was a big day for Operation Pollinator.  Probably the first of many big days.

I may have to downgrade my scale of big to small days, but whatever.  Today felt big.

Today I went with my horticulture expert and my PI to check out three of my six OP sites, one of which was performing pretty poorly:

One of which was looking pretty good:

And one which was truly blowing all the others out of the water.  BAM!  Come at me, pollinators!

Can you tell I'm excited about this?  I am.

And guess what's bloomin'?  Lots of stuff:

Plains coreopsis.  The two pictures above are the same species.  Isn't that amazing?!

Lots of you folks will probably recognize Rudbeckia, or Black-Eyed Susan.  This stuff is coming on in a big way.

 A really big way!  Look at all that Rudbeckia!

Lance-leaved coreopsis is still chugging away.

And now the sunflowers are out!  We scared up a few yellow finches in this plot.  Hope they weren't eyeing my sunflowers!

This New England aster is preparing to bloom.  

We even found a tiny handful of asters already up and blooming.  I wasn't expecting these guys until much, much later in the season.  Like, three months from now.

This weirdly phallic, but pretty, flower is a prairie coneflower.  It's the first of our coneflowers that I've spotted so far this season, but we have several more species that should appear soon.

Finally, I do have a few (SO MANY!) weedy species that have popped up in my plots.  A few of them, while technically not native, are lovely and seem to attract lots of pollinators.  These include:

Poison hemlock.

Fleabane.

And nettles.

And a few others which I absent-mindedly forgot to take pictures of, including Queen Anne's lace, larkspur, and a form of mallow.

The larkspur I plucked to bring back for ID'ing (but also for making my desk purty).

I'm thinking of allowing these guys to grow throughout the season as long as they don't take over too aggressively.  The pollinators seem to love them.  The reason they weren't originally included in our wildflower mixes (particularly the Queen Anne's lace and the larkspur, which are both near and dear to my heart), is because they are not technically native to North America.  These guys were brought over from Europe at some point in the distant past, but are now fairly ubiquitous throughout this part of the country.  We'll see.

Finally, who wants to see some pollinators?

Oh yeah, native pollinators of all shapes and sizes.  We've got your bees, we've got your flies, we've got your wasps and butterflies.

I'm excited.

Still have to explain exactly what this project is about, but I'll get to that.

Later.  Sometime in the future.

Here's me!

Grant writing, amirite?!

Field season has truly started here, and, let me tell you, it's been absolutely kicking my ass.  I love being outside, working hard, getting sunburnt, and drinking recovery beers at the end of the day as much as the next gal--but not ten days in a row.  Time for a break.

So, here I sit on my first day in the lab in a long while typing away at a grant I'm working on for the USGA, fully immersed in air conditioning, giving my feet a well-deserved break from my Chacos...and I'm already bored.  Give me back my field season!

Seriously, writing (at least this type of writing) is an absolute chore for me.  I don't mind writing stale, starchy methods and results sections because that's simply the best way to present that information.  It's the background/objectives/discussion that breaks my heart.  Why does it need to be so formal and crusty?  What necessitates stiffness and boredom?  WHY PASSIVE VOICE?!  Why?!

It's the liberal arts in me that makes this so difficult.  I have been formally trained (well, it's been forced down my throat and imprinted on my brain) to communicate my ideas clearly, eloquently, and engagingly.  No more. R1 research institute demands that my writing consist entirely of:  Complete Clause (citation). Complete Clause (citation).

Jeez.

Anyone else out there feeling my pain?

On a lighter note:  Operation Pollinator plots!

This is the plot at one of our fancier golf courses.  Picture was taken ~1 month ago--silly me.  I need updated stuff for this business.

This is... beats me.  Not actually one of my native plants that I seeded in, but it was pretty and the pollinators loved it.  Does anyone know?

This is a poppy.  But it's not my poppy.  It just showed up in one of my sites.  Mistake on the part of the wildflower seed company?  Pretty nonetheless.

This beautiful sucker is lance-leaved coreopsis.  It's definitely the dominant bloomer right now, but I anticipate plains coreopsis and black-eyed Susans taking over at some point.

More updates on the Operation Pollinator plots to follow--and an explanation of what exactly Operation Pollinator is.  How did I miss that the first time around?