User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
At the beginning stages of my field research project, I took a day or two to choose my research topic and my first observations of the area went smoothly. Since my sample area was located in my backyard, time was never a factor with my field data collections. However, the further I got into this project, the more difficulties I faced. An important lesson that I learned was that not all potential explanatory variables will be easily collected, examined or measured. I found this when I was deciding on how to represent and measure the effects of pH on Common Fern Moss percent cover. I was unable to easily measure the pH of the dead and healthy portions of grass and I was unable to think of a way to represent this data while displaying the relationship between pH and absence/presence of Common Fern Moss. I had to work around this problem by resorting to research articles touching on this relationship instead. In terms of the design of my project, I had to make a few adjustments along the way which weren’t too problematic. For example, I changed my quadrat size from 1m2to 0.25m2in order to minimize the amount of overlap between quadrats, and by doing this I had to recollect data on the first five quadrats I placed in the yard (which wasn’t an inconvenience as I had to collect data on 10 additional quadrats anyways…). Enrolling in this course and carrying out this research project on my own has not only altered my perspective on this practice, but has also increased my appreciation for the time and effort put in by ecologists to understand ecological processes and patterns. Conducting a research project isn’t easy, and from my experience, I believe it is a task that requires quite a bit of patience and an optimistic and open mindset.
