User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
I have continued to view the three locations for a few days. After observation of the park and the species that reside there throughout the day, I realized I could not make a decision on which species I wanted to study. I decided to look at all the species of insects in the sanctuary, and focus on the differences in the number and species composition of insects between the three locations, which have varying amounts of water sources. I have noticed the sanctuary in particular, which is situated around water, seems to have high amounts of insects constantly flying and crawling when compared to the two other areas, which do not have a large source of water. With this observation as a basis, I hypothesize that a large, open source of water either attracts increased amounts of insects or acts as an optimal breeding ground for increased amounts of insects, when in comparison to areas that do not have as prominent of a water source. With this in mind, I predict that the bird sanctuary, having lots of open water, will contain high amounts of insect species and abundance, and areas that do not have as much of a water source, being the meadow and even more so, the residential complex will have decreasing insect species abundance and number of individuals. A potential response variable is the species richness in the area, being based upon the predictor variable, the location of the area being tested and possibly, the amount of water being made available to the insects. In this case, the data will be considered continuous, and categorical, because the species abundance can be measured on a numerical scale, but the richness or types of species in the area cannot, so is a categorical data set.
