Blog Post 5: Design Reflections.

My initial data collection based on my strategy went well. Since day 1 the density of geese around the waterbodies was obvious and the areas that I chose to collect data from were fairly close to each other. As I was collecting data I noticed that the number of geese around the ponds were much higher than around the river, which was supporting my initial hypothesis. The difficulty in my sampling strategy was regarding replication, I was not sure how to do that. So, I decided to count the number of geese at the 6 locations I chose twice a day and to also record the weather to see if that affected the number of geese. I counted counted the geese 5m around the ponds and river spots because they were in groups.

I was surprised with the data because there were so many geese around the ponds which I did not expect. I collected data using this strategy for 15 days. I also thought about dividing the grassland around just one pond into 10 quadrats and count the number of geese in them but I was not sure if that would prove my hypothesis, since I wanted to compare the density around 2 kinds of waterbodies. I achieved replication by collecting data twice a day in 6 spots so I did not modify the strategy. I decided to go ahead with my initial strategy because I wanted variation and more data to prove my hypothesis.