Blog 8: Summary Table

To summarize my findings for the richness of healthy living moss found on the trunks of trees I had to use a number scale to help average out my finds to show any difference in the moss richness found on the three tree top coverage categories. Once it was decided that a tree with hardly no moss present would be given a value of zero, a tree with some healthy moss present was 0.5, and a tree with high moss richness was 1.0 it was easy to summarize the data collected.

As shown in table 1 the partial tree top exposer category showed the highest average of moss richness, this went against the prediction that moss richness would be highest at the shelter tree top group. Though it was shown that the exposed tree top group did have the lowest moss richness where it was about half the amount of the other two tree categories which supports the prediction that the exposed tree top group would have the lowest moss richness. As the data was being collected over the two weeks it was observed that the partial tree top exposer group had increased the moss richness on the tree trunk the most noticeably. Where it is thought the partial tree top exposer will have the fastest rate of increased moss richness on the tree trunks when entering the spring season in British Columbia when compared to the other two tree groups. However, more data collected over a longer time period during the late winter and spring season is needed to test this prediction.

Table 1: Total average of  healthy living moss found on the tree trunks of the three tree top exposer categories. Each tree top category contained ten replicates where date was collected four times at each site over the spanned of two weeks. A number value of 0.0, 0.5, and 1.0 was used to stand for no moss richness, some moss richness, and high moss richness found on each of the tree trunks respectively.