The field season has started - some tricky pictures :)

Now the field season has started and our group spends a lot of time in different parts of Hungary.

Last week, Réka Kiss and Kata Lukács continued one of Réka's favourite projects. In this study, Réka visits the study sites many times per year and the area always shows a different face. From the pictures taken in late April it is not easy to guess what plant is in the focus of this project :)

This picture shows some plastic lids in the grass - but this is not garbage, this is a very important part of our study :)

From a little bit closer, we can observe that the position of the lid marks the position of a very special plant.

Réka is surveying her monitoring plots for this special plant and marks all the vegetative individuals with lids. The different colours are for the different phenological stages: plants with different leaf numbers are marked with different colours.

This very special plant is the spring meadow saffron (Colchicum bulbocodium) which shows its most beautiful and characteristic face in early spring.

Réka is studying the population dynamics of this strictly protected and endangered plant. She has detailed four-year-long dataset on the abundance, phenology, flowering and fruiting success of the individuals and aims to analyse the reproductive success of the plants in the function of climatic parameters.