User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Did you have any difficulties in implementing your sampling strategy?
Yes, ~6 trees I was not able to record data for as the photos I initially took to analyse were too dark or too bright to tell the relative colour of the leaves. If I had done this analysis earlier I would have enough time to revisit those 6 trees to make a larger potential data set.
There were some surprises in the data. There was 1 tree in the thicker part of the forest that had 90% healthy leaves, which was much higher than the other trees in the same area (0-59%). You would expect that the area with the thickest forest would have hurt the growing chances of the tree. In this case the tree was quite tall in that. It was above most of the other tall trees, so this makes sense. It must have started growing before the younger trees had caught up to it. This area was recently logged so it gave at least a couple arbutus trees a chance to grow tall enough before the original forest took over.
There was one other sample that was interesting. It was Arbutus #7. It was a relatively small arbutus in an open area with few neighbours. 1 tree was directly overhead but wasn’t large, so maybe in this case the main issue wasn’t shade from the other trees but direct composition in the soil with neighbouring trees and a larger amount of brambles and bushes.
Otherwise the data did line up with expectations. Almost universally the the forested Arbutus were not healthy and small and larger healthier arbutus were found in the open areas and cliffs with fewer tall surrounding tree neighbours (including one huge tree with over 1000 leaves and with virtually zero damaged leaves).
