User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
I chose to do a Systematic sample by distance, and my sampling strategy worked quite well for collecting data. I had 3 transect lines along 3 different gradients 20 feet apart. Each transect was 50 feet long, with a point (one unit) selected every 10 feet to make up 5 points on each transect. Each point was a stake in the ground where I would measure the 7 closest vascular plants. The forest was quite accessible this time of year, since a lot of the plants had lost their leaves, it wasn’t too overgrown to walk through. It became problematic when I was trying to measure distance between some plants, especially in dense areas. I initially was going to take down data for 5 different plants at each point, but found 7 to be more useful due to the closeness of some plants, and more data to work with. Another difficulty I came across was the fact that a lot of the plants had lost leaves and made it tough to identify. I took a lot of images and spent quite a bit of time making sure they were the correct species.
The data was only surprising in that there were species here I did not know about. I knew ferns would be quite dominant, but didn’t realize that they would be prominent in a large portion of the selected points.
One thing I should consider, is that it may be of my interest to measure the density or circumference of each plant to get a greater understanding of how well they grow in each gradient. This would mean I would have to re-do the data collection, but I am not against the idea of narrowing down my study to a couple species. This might help focus my study and allow me narrow it down.
