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Blog Post 6 – 16/02/20
Field collection went well today. I went out to collect data at 1700 hours. The skies were clear and the temperature was mild, a few degrees above zero. There was a slight wind and some mild snow cover, but otherwise there were no issues with collecting my data. Today I surveyed the location of the trees within the randomly selected sample locations. The tree sampling went well and there were no issues with implementing the stratified random sampling design. Firstly, I divided the areas into the three strata of pond land, central park land, and edge land. 15 transects were then randomly selected with 5 quadrats per transect. Transect amounts reflected the percentage covered by each strata namely 8 transects for central park land, 4 transects for edge land, and 3 transects for pond land. I then marked each quadrat with an “X” to indicate the presence or absence of each of the three tree species, white spruce (Picea glauca), aspen poplar (Populus tremuloides), and white birch (Betula papyrufera). Upon collecting this data I noticed that there was a surprisingly high amount of white birch trees in the pond land transects, which was unexpected and caused me to reflect upon my hypothesis. I am now wondering if the white birch (B. papyrufera) tree species requires a higher soil moisture level to survive. However, a substantial amount of white birch was also found in the central park and edge land transects, therefore it is possible that the which birch thrives in all soil types. I will do some research on the growing conditions for white birch and use the information to reflect upon my findings. For this data collection I also sampled three replicates from each of the three strata to determine the soil moisture content. As expected, there were higher levels of moisture in pond land soil than anywhere else in the park, while edge land soil had the lowest levels of moisture. In essence, the moisture sampling also went very well despite the light snow cover and overall the data collection went very well today.
