User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
I had a very difficult time trying to come up with a graph as I did a presence/absence quadrat and did not measure soil moisture content very precisely. I definitely should have gotten quantitative values for the soil moisture content instead of using a general description. I wanted to do a graph, but ended up making a table for lack of better ideas.
As I had to look long and hard at my field notes to decide what kind of graph or table to make, I ended up drawing a couple of unexpected conclusions about my data. Initially I was focused on simply the presence/absence of Labrador Tea but I noticed that biodiversity in general was higher within the wetlands than at the more extreme dry or flooded areas. Optimal soil moisture content promotes greater biodiversity. I also noticed that the Labrador Tea was the most prevalent species, indicating it may be a stronger competitor than a lot of other wetland vegetation. The general trend for biodiversity was unexpected, as I was only planning to make conclusions about optimal growth conditions for Labrador Tea.
Further exploration would entail more precise field measurements of soil moisture content. Of course sampling more quadrats and identifying more species would give greater detail if I wanted to look at biodiversity more generally.
