User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
My sampling strategies went better than I expected during the first few times I went out monitor ant activity. There was obvious ant activity that made the data collection easy. However, I am currently having some difficulties with my method. We have had some bad weather recently that has made any animal or insect activity scarce. Once the weather clears up, I plan to continue my current method of collection. The only modification may make is checking more frequently. I was going out every few days so as to not be too disruptive and cause a fluctuation in the numbers due to human activity. However, the weather this time of year can vary so greatly at any given moment that taking multiple samples a day (before bad weather and after, morning and afternoon etc) may help me acquire better results. I also need to make sure I wait for it to be warm enough for ants to be out when I go out because some mornings can be cold and have not much activity.
One thing I found surprising is the number of ants changed the day before the weather changed. I went out to collect data and found no ant activity in any of my quadrats. Given the amount I had found previously I was not sure why there was none on the day I went out, especially in areas where the numbers have been consistent.
It is important to consider weather conditions when sampling animal activity and so glad to hear you are. You will want to make sure you have similar weather conditions at least in sampling the different areas along your gradient. For example, if you have a narrow window of good weather do 1 quadrat in one part of your gradient and then 1 in the other part of your gradient so you are sampling both under similar weather. As well, you could record weather for each sampling date and if you haven’t been doing that so far you can go back and fill it in using Environment Canada data. This would not be part of your hypothesis though these data can still be reported and brought into your discussion.