Tag Archives: plants

Prairie Word of the Day – Phenology

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Hello, and welcome to the fifth edition of the popular series, “Prairie Word of the Day.” This is the series that has previously brought you such inspiring words/phrases as Tiller, Habitat Heterogeneity, Disturbance and Shifting Mosaic of Habitat. Thank you for the many cards and letters expressing your gratitude for the explanations of these words, and suggesting future topics.

Today’s featured word is Phenology. In short, phenology is the study of the timing of various events in the lives of plants and animals and the factors that influence that timing. Phenology should not be confused with Phrenology, which is the long discredited study of how the shape and size of the human skull supposedly correlates with character traits and mental capacity. Phrenology has been used to bilk people of their money, support racist and sexist stereotypes, and bolster Nazi eugenics. Let’s not talk about that today.

Phenology, without the “r”, is a complex and important topic in ecology. You might hear someone talk about the phenology of plants related to when they begin emerging from the ground, when they flower, and when they begin to wilt and senesce at the end of the growing season. Additionally, however, phenology includes the timing of the emergence of insects from dormancy or their final molt into adulthood. It also includes the timing of animal migrations and hibernation, as well as many other events in the lives of myriad organisms.

This bee (either Melissodes agilis or M. trinodis) is a specialist feeder on sunflower pollen and is only active during the period of summer when sunflowers are blooming. If the bee emerged before sunflowers started blooming, it might not find anything to eat.

The factors that influence a species’ phenology often include temperature, light, and moisture – in combination with genetic signals. We still have a lot to learn about the phenology of most prairie species, especially in terms of how they might adapt to changing climate. In fact, rapid climate change has brought much recent attention to phenology because changes in the flowering time of plants, for example, have already helped illustrate the occurrence and impacts of climate change. In addition, there is great concern that species may not be able to adapt the timing of their lives quickly enough to match the changing climate, and/or that timing of interdependent species might not remain synchronized. For example, flowers might start blooming before or after their particular pollinators are active, or birds or insects might migrate to breeding areas before food is available at those sites. A couple years ago, monarch butterflies arrived in Nebraska way ahead of schedule, but fortunately they were still able to something to eat and lay eggs on.

When monarchs arrived in Nebraska much earlier than normal, dandelions were one of the few abundant wildflowers for them to feed on and they laid eggs on whorled milkweed because common milkweed hadn’t emerged yet.

Here in Nebraska, we got some interesting insight into the phenology of plants during 2012. The year ended up giving us the most severe single year drought in recorded history and it started out as a year of extraordinarily warm temperatures. In fact, spring and summer temperatures arrived so early that we recorded many plant species blooming weeks or months ahead of their typical schedule. I wrote a short blog post about this back in May of 2012 and a number of people from around North America responded with their own sightings. The observation that stood out most to me was the blooming of asters in May. I had never seen heath aster (Aster ericoides) or New England aster (Aster novae-engliae) bloom before late August or September.

Phenology is also important to land managers trying to sustain biological diversity in prairies. For example, around here, we are constantly fighting cool-season invasive grasses. The growth period for those species starts earlier and ends later than that of most native prairie plants. That gives us some opportunities to use herbicides to kill or suppress smooth brome, Kentucky bluegrass, or other invasive grasses when the chance of harming other plants is very low. In addition, we can use prescribed fire, grazing or mowing to target those grasses when they are most vulnerable. For example, we might try to burn a prairie right as those species are starting to bloom because it wipes out those plants’ entire season of energy investment in growth and flowering. The fire doesn’t kill those grasses, but it can knock them back enough to allow other plants – especially those just starting their growth periods – to flourish while the vigor of the invasive grasses is low.

We timed this burn to suppress cool-season invasive grasses, which were just starting to bloom. After the fire, many warm-season grasses (and other plants) responded quickly because they were just beginning their period of most active growth.

Timing of burns can also be aimed at suppressing many other kinds of plants. For example, we sometimes try to burn prairies when encroaching trees are just leafing out and highly vulnerable. Alternatively, burns can be timed to limit impacts on animal or plant species. That might include strategically scheduling a fire based on the emergence of rare insect species or before sensitive reptiles become active in the spring. Prescribed grazing can be employed in much the same way – strategically moving livestock in and out of an area to suppress the growth of particular plants or to create desired habitat structure prior to the arrival or emergence of particular animal species. In all these cases, land managers are acutely aware of the phenology of the species they are trying to suppress or assist.

If you’re someone who enjoys keeping track of when things happen each year, you might enjoy joining a citizen science effort to document changes in the phenology of many different phenomenon. You could start at the National Phenology Network and peruse some of the options they provide. Or, if you already have years of field notes that document when you see your first bumblebee, prairie clover flower, or grasshopper sparrow each year, I’d encourage you to contact a local expert on that/those particular species and let them know about your data. You might have information of great value to conservation.

Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Olivia Marvels at the Persistence of Plants

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This post was written by Olivia Schouten, one of our Hubbard Fellows this year.  Olivia is an excellent scientist, with strong expertise in plants and plant communities, as you’ll be able to see from this post.  

As a biologist with broad interests, I can usually find something to love in all living things, but I’ll admit that plants have a special place in my heart. This is probably a good thing, since I’ve spent the majority of my education and professional life cultivating my knowledge of plants. I’ve found that they are often underappreciated and often overlooked, which is a shame, because plants are some of the most amazing organisms out there (in my humble opinion).

Plants, in most places, not only form the basis of the food chain, but also provide the structure of habitat. A forest with towering trees is very different than an open grassland or a sparsely vegetated desert, and the animals that live there respond accordingly. Plants are eaten, trampled underfoot, exposed to the whims of the weather, and just generally beaten down by the world around them, all on top of competing with each other for resources and space. But while plants have it rough, they are also really good at persisting.

Trees are an excellent example of just how persistent plants can be. I was reminded of this earlier in the summer when I came across a grove of cottonwoods in one of our Platte Prairies while searching for musk thistles. At first glance I thought one of the cottonwoods had recently fallen and the leaves hadn’t died back yet. On closer inspection, however, I realized that the tree had probably fallen years ago, and instead of dying, the parts of the trunk that now contacted the earth had sprouted roots and continued on living. Branches had grown up from the trunk,and now looked essentially like three trees, all connected by the same fallen trunk.

This cottonwood, in true tree fashion, just refused to die. Photo by Olivia Schouten

Trees are clearly hard to kill, as anyone who’s tried to cut down a deciduous tree in your yard knows. Once the tree is cut you have to treat the stump with herbicide, otherwise the still-living roots will simply sprout again. Nearly every tree we cut here on the Platte to keep our prairies open needs to be treated with an herbicide. While it would be nice to not have to use chemicals in our stewardship work like this, that resilience of trees can also be a blessing. After the wildfire at our Niobrara Valley Preserve a few years ago, much of the forest along the river was killed. However, the oaks along the slopes are re-sprouting from their roots, as only the tops of the trees had been killed in the blaze. Because of this, these forests have a jump start on regenerating after the devastation of the fire.

It’s probably a good thing musk thistles are so showy, otherwise it would be much more difficult to find them.  Photo by Olivia Schouten

Since I found that cottonwood looking for musk thistles, it’s probably worth talking about them and their own resilient strategies. As a biennial, these plants only have one chance to flower and produce seeds, so they produce thousands of them at a time. And they can fly. That’s not great for us, considering they are considered noxious weeds here in Nebraska, but as a strategy for this plant it certainly pays off.

But wait, there’s more! Even when uprooted or sprayed with herbicide, if the flowers on a musk thistle plant have been pollinated, they will still produce seeds! So when we control this plant, we not only cut off the root just under the ground and pull it out, we have to collect any flowers, or else nothing will actually have been controlled. This persistent ability of musk thistles makes things more difficult and time consuming for us to control, but you have to admit that it’s a cool adaptation, and in its native habitat, likely very useful.

We collected about three tubfuls of musk thistle flowers by the end of the control season. We let the flowers rot to make sure any seeds were destroyed before throwing them out.  Photo by Olivia Schouten

So far these examples relate back to land management, and how the difficulty in killing plants affects our ability to effectively manage invasive plants in prairies. But we rely on these same tenacious qualities in our native prairies species as well. Chris talks a lot about the resilience of prairies on this blog, and a lot of that depends on the persistent nature of individual plants.

Consider big bluestem, a favorite of both cattle and bison. It can be cropped down again and again to within an inch of the ground over a growing season, but while such trauma might kill another plant, big bluestem holds on until the herd moves on and it gets a break, coming back taller and stronger the next year, until it’s back to full strength within a few years. In addition, even in those years that it’s hammered by grazing, big bluestem will find a way to flower, since all that short and weak vegetation around them makes for a good place to put out seeds.

This patch of big bluestem has been hit pretty hard by cows this year, but that didn’t stop it from blooming.  Photo by Olivia Schouten

Other plants may just find that conditions in a certain year aren’t for them. Maybe it’s too dry, or too cold, or the grasses around them are just too tall. Perennial prairie plants don’t let that stop them, as many will simply take a break, growing very little above ground for a year, relying more on stores of energy in their roots than anything else. To some, it may seem like those plants have died and disappeared from a field. But just wait, when conditions become favorable, most of those plants will show up again, just as strong, and benefiting from that strategy of waiting it out through the hard times.

Now, just because plants are tough doesn’t mean they’re invincible. If put under too much stress even the most stubborn plant will eventually die. Knowing how plants are able to persist can help us more effectively target those plants we don’t want, but also help ensure that our desirable plants always have a chance to let their persistent nature shine!