Playing in the sandbox - year 1

-- Karin Burghardt, PhD Candidate

For most people the trees losing their leaves for the year invokes a bit of sadness for the lost summer, however, I am breathing a sigh of relief. The end of the growing season and loss of leaves means a respite from fieldwork and a chance to reflect on how my experiment is shaping up (and how much more there is to be done).

Last fall the lab helped me with an epic construction project to erect 28 raised beds at my field site and fill them with 20 tons of sand and 20 tons of field soil –accomplished by wheelbarrow (I know I owe them all my first born… but probably they would prefer cookies for life).

The raised beds are visible from google earth!

In any case this past June I planted into the sandboxes mixtures of goldenrod genotypes known to express different plant defensive traits. The experiment also manipulates soil nutrients and herbivory. Over the next few years I will measure how plant defensive traits, herbivores, and nutrients influence plant and herbivore fitness and competition as well as trace nutrient cycling within the sandboxes. 

Planting goldenrod in sandboxes.

Experiment set up complete!

As a result, over the summer I spent a lot of time taking plant and nutrient measurements and playing Where’s Waldo with my grasshopper herbivores within the sandbox enclosures.

Looking for these guys...

...and keep getting distracted by these...

...and these!

Super-genotype 17 flowering away.

Now the plants have gotten quite large and flowered (only 3 out of 288 didn’t survive!) and I have reams of data to sort through and piles of leaves to grind up for nutrient analysis. I’ll be sorting through the data over the next few months, excited to see what happened and plan for the next few years of the experiment!