User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
This project, and the course in general, gave me a greater appreciation for ecology as a discipline of science. I didn’t really have a good idea of what it was about before I started this course. Once I got into the project I didn’t have any trouble implementing the design and didn’t find any reason to change it too much. The focus of the project changed slightly due to my observations once out in the field. The overall theme remained the same but I did narrow my focus. I would have liked to collect more data: sample more sites, in more locations, to get a better representation of the true forest ecology in my data. This, I think, is the struggle in science. Juggling time and cost with efficient and accurate data collection.
I found the project very interesting once I had all my data and began analyzing it in the office. This is an aspect of ecology that I really like. I’m a numbers guy so I really like the statistical analyses of the data, looking for patterns and correlations. To me this is really interesting; quantifying and testing patterns we observe in the field.
