User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
My data has been difficult to put into a graph and summarize. The outcome was not what I had expected or predicted. This is in regards to the aquatic insect numbers increasing with number of plants. Plotting number of plants against number of aquatic insects created a random scatter plot with no real trend line.
The one relationship I can see is plotted in the graph above, but difficult to see without some explanation. Transects 1-5 has the most consistent amount of plant growth, while 6-12 have lower plant growth that is more sporadic. Transects 1-5 have higher number of insect species versus transects 6-12 (the transects are located across a shoreline from every 4’ from 1-12). Transect 7 and 9 throw things off a bit, since they have high plant numbers but lower levels of insect species. My thought is that the transects next to them have fewer plants, so more insects may gravitate towards the area of denser plants, transects 1-5. It’s possible some of the species may only stay in areas of more plant density.
As I stated in my last blog post 6, breaking the pond into plant densities on a larger scale, and random sampling each of those areas, would be a better design along with identification of each species.
