On the number of Birch partitions

Birch and Tverberg partitions are closely related concepts from discrete geometry. We show two properties for the number of Birch partitions: Evenness, and a lower bound. This implies the first non-trivial lower bound for the number of Tverberg partitions that holds for arbitrary q, where q is the number of partition blocks. The proofs are based on direct arguments, and do not use the equivariant method from topological combinatorics.