User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
I have changed my study topic and will not be carrying out the study that I outlined in earlier blog posts. My new study will also take place at the Richmond Garden City Lands. During the implementation of my previous study I noticed that there was a man made walkway through the bog and that there appeared to be more abundance nearer the path. I have decided to collect samples on a transect. I used five transect lines spaced 5-m apart. Each transect began on the edge of the man made path and was walked 10-m East into the bog. The transect was sampled at three random points (1-10 meters from the path). At each point I placed a quadrant and identified the amount of vegetation covered using a 0.5-mx0.5m quadrant that was gridded to have 25 10-cmx10-cm squares. I took the pH of from the centre of each quadrant to see if there was an association with pH and vegetation abundance as well.
I thought that it would be a good idea to do the transect sampling randomly. By laying out 5 transects and randomizing a number from 1-10 using the generator from random.org. I have changed my mind on this and will be sampling systematically at three points spaced 5-m apart on each transect. I decided to change this strategy to make sure that quadrants were not too close to each other so that I could be confident that these samples had independence.
Collecting this data also made me realize that I lacked focus for a hypothesis. I found that plant diversity had a more interesting pattern. There was more plant diversity near the path than there was in the bog. I think that this is because many plants are sensitive to slight changes in pH and the man-made path brought less acidic soil to the bog. I think that this is why there is less species diversity further away from the path. I believe that plant diversity will decrease as the soil becomes more acidic. The transects will be used in the same design as described above but the predictor variable will be soil pH (or acidity) and the response variable will be plant diversity.
