User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Well, where do I begin?! I have learned so much in this course & I am very grateful to Nancy for her ability to teach me new concepts through the difficult interface of distance learning. I am thankful for the insight & feedback provided to me throughout this course.
I chose Community & Ecosystem Ecology as my first correspondence course through TRU with multiple factors in mind; The course sounded unique & interesting and I was hopeful it would give me a better understanding of the natural world & how it functions. I have not been disappointed. By designing & learning how to do an actual hands-on field research project, I now have some new skills & a richer overall appreciation for what ecologists & scientists in related fields carry out on a regular basis. I appreciate even more so that it is absolutely critical to support our scientists & their development of ecological theory as our planet & all of its inhabitant’s head into a relatively uncertain future.
With regard to my field research project- at first I did run into a few challenges. The location I chose to conduct my field research project is a place I attend every single day. It only made sense that I would take my daily observations & the resulting questions I had about the site & put them into a project for analysis. Well as it turned out, I couldn’t decide on exactly what I wanted to know, or how I was to ask the question, or develop any type of hypothesis…in the end, I finally decided on observing abundance of individual plant species located in two sites within the borders of same park, and I feel that I chose the right project to focus on.
Because of this course & the knowledge & skills that I have since acquired, I have been inspired to conduct multiple field research samples throughout the year, since I will be on site every day anyhow, and I will record the data into bar graphs to observe the results. I am very curious to know if I will find any type of decline or increase in plant abundance throughout different parts of the year, or, if the temperature here in Victoria holds steady enough to support the same plants years round? It should be interesting to see, & something I am looking forward to!
Good luck to all, thanks again Nancy, & here’s to a happy & healthy 2018!!
Michelle
~A Hopeful Science Nerd~
awesome post! glad you got lots out of this!