User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Some of the challenges that I experienced during the research project was that the amount of different species that was being collected was too many to accurately tabulate my findings. I had to modify my hypothesis to only focus several specific species of vegetations to avoid getting lost in the data.
One thing that I struggled with and still do but not as much was with identifying plants and vegetation. I found it difficult trying to figure out what plant species I was looking at or looking for.
Another challenge was that the soil samples were collected in one day and therefore will only reflect the soil moisture on that given and will not represent an average moisture content for a season or month.
A speed bump that happened for me was that some of my data was collected over time as I tried to space it out but in October in Calgary we experienced a fair amount of snow which covered the ground for about 2 weeks in Fish Creek. So this snow coverage prevented me from gathering some of my data until a little later than expected. It also killed and wilted some vegetation we made species a little more difficult to identify and tabulate as some species were now laying dead on the ground instead of upright.
I think if I was enrolled in this class in spring and had collected my data during April or May, I would have seen a more distinct response of vegetation to the flooding being experienced as it would have been more common with the consistent melting of snow.
