User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
I used a scatter plot to illustrate the relationship between soil moisture and percent slope from the data I collected. I ran into two primary challenges when creating my figure. The first issue I encountered was how to organize it in a way that maintained its clarity. I had 150 data points to plot on the figure, and after inputting them all I felt that the graph looked disorganized and busy, making it difficult to analyze. I tried to rectify this issue by including three extra plot points depicting the mean values across each of my three subareas, as well as trendlines, in an attempt to make patterns throughout the data more easily discernable. Inevitably, I don’t believe this was successful. The second issue I ran into was with my figure caption. I struggled with getting it properly formatted underneath my graph and additionally, I found it difficult to write it in such a way that explained my graph concisely. Word choice was difficult, redundancy as well as clarity were a challenge for me. I need to find a better way to more clearly describe which data was drawn from which subarea.
The data from my research were not totally consistent with my hypothesis. Soil moisture was, in fact, lowest where I thought it would be highest however, trees were largest at the bottom of the hill, as expected. Tree density was also highest at the bottom of the hill however, I predicted it would be highest at the midpoint. In terms of unexpected patterns, it appears that tree species distribution showed some degree of zonation across the slope.
Further research could explore this topic more in depth by measuring soil moisture within deeper layers of soil using more sophisticated tools, and look at changes in soil moisture as it relates to precipitation by collecting data at a variety of dates after a rainstorm to see how runoff might impact near-surface soil moisture across a slope.
