User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Shannon Myles
January 30th, 2020
The study area chosen is a strip of grassland in Satellite Beach, Florida that separates the beach from the highway. The area covers a rectangle of about 250m alongside the beach and of about 90-100m deep towards the road. The land is flat from the road all to where the terrain abruptly drops 3-4 feet onto the beginning of the beach and eventually into the ocean.
The vegetation in the area seems to be poorly diverse with only a few different grass types, flowering plants and palm trees. The palm trees are scattered in what seems to be a random pattern throughout the area. The site also has Sea Grapes, a type of shrub with large round green leaves. As for the flowering plants, four different varieties were observed in the field. Two yellow flower kinds, one very small white flower, and another small purple flower kind were seen at the site.
The area seems to have been left unshaped by man except for this one clear path of about a car’s width that goes from the road to the beach. The path is characterized by not having any vegetation other than short, scattered patches of grass. The soil seems to be very compact in the area, which leads me to believe that the path is used a lot or by heavy machines.
I visited the site around 12:30 on a sunny Wednesday. As the pictures show, a few clouds were in the sky. The temperature was 15C° and felt cold because of the wind coming from the ocean.
What interests me a lot about this site is the possibility to study the gradient formed by the step-cline created by the ocean meeting the land and its effect on the abundance or physiology of organisms. Some of the questions I had while walking through the area were the following:
- How does the abundance of flowering plants vary in relation to the distance with the ocean in the ecotone?
- Is the width of Sea Grape leaves affected by its proximity to the step-cline?
- Is there a correlation between the height of the palm trees in the area and their distance from the beach?
