User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
There were several difficulties during the field research, especially when designing the field experiment and carrying it out.
First, in the step of designing field experiment I had difficulties in deciding response variable that represents what it was meant from hypothesis. The hypothesis is that overall ecology are healthier and varies in species as more artificial land development induced in the region. Independent variable was 3 levels of landscape that differs in land development. While response variable was hard to decide because it needed to represent the vegetation was healthier. At first I thought of measuring the ratio of green grass and dry grass would represent the health of vegetation, ecology. However, I didn’t put in the consideration that three landscapes had way more species other than grass. So, I decided to count the number of species that can be counted within in the quadrat also, I decided to count the green area per quadrat to represent the health of ecology. I also didn’t want to measure merely vegetations so I decided to measure bird activities as well. All three experiments later wards represented the intention of the experiment well.
Also, in the step of implementing the experiment I had issues in choosing sampling techniques. As the landscape were very small quadrat was easily overlapped when I was using random sampling techniques. This might lead the data to be inaccurate. Therefore, I decided to change the sampling technique to systematic. This helped getting more accurate data and observations.
Although my research project was limited in small region and there was not enough samples to support the hypothesis. I realized that practicing an research study, especially on ecology, would be way much more harder than I expected. It was hard to design an appropriate experiment that supports the theme and whether it represents well. Also in the process of carrying out getting the data from the field required a lots of commitment. Due to this project, I had a good time to appreciate of how ecological theory had developed.
