Post 5: Design Reflections

After walking around Milliken District Park and observing my potential sampling sites, I got a better idea of how I would collect my data and implement my sampling strategy. Prior to doing this, I was a little confused on how I could collect data, but my initial observations helped me make more sense of it. As such, I did not face much difficulty in actually implementing my sampling strategy. I believe that the data that I collected was actually not surprising in any way. I expected some discrepancies, and was somewhat expecting to see some differences in the distribution of the six species, as there are factors such as sun exposure and climate that come into play. As a result, I plan to continue using the same technique in order to collect data. The same technique can also promote consistency in the result obtained. I believe that the time and weather that samples are collected in will have an impact on the results obtained, and thus I will have to take this into consideration when analyzing.

I decided to use the systematic sampling strategy as I felt it would be the best choice in my sampling areas. The first site, Site A, is within the forest, the second site, Site B, is outside of the forest, just before a large pond, and the third site, Site C, is the area on the other side of the pond. Percentage coverage was measured using a 1m² quadrat, the abundance of the species using a 0.5m² quadrat, and absence/presence using a 0.25m² quadrant. These measurements were determined based on the amount of plants, as well as the size of the plants present in the area selected. Each of the three quadrats was placed randomly five times at each site, and data was collected. Abundance was measured using the ACFOR scale (Abundant, Common, Frequent, Occasional, or Rare), which will be explained in more details below. When looking at the variable of presence/absence, an ‘X’ represents the species that were present, and no ‘X’ represents that the species was absent in that region.