User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
It has been a whirlwind of effort to design and implement a field experiment in a few weeks. One of the main issues that arose during implementation was that there were far more fern fronds per plant than I expected. To manage this issue, I limited the number of fronds I measured to ten per fern as that is what I could fit into my notebook, and that would hopefully have the power of statistical analysis. As I wanted to maintain consistency across all the treatments and samples, I decided that I would start with the frond closest to me at the top of the fern and move in a clockwise direction until I came back to the first fern at which point I would move to the next level down. I had also intended to look at whether the fern had fern neighbors as a way to look at density, but these results did not show any significant patterns. I think the better alternative would be to put down quadrats to determine the number of ferns in the area. Additionally, my lack of botanical knowledge was certainly a detriment to my experiment as I could not determine diversity or species richness around the ferns or even among the ferns. If I had the knowledge, I would have examined the other species around the ferns to get a better idea of the competition. Lastly, if I had the tools, I would also have measured the soil for moisture and Nitrogen content in each of the locations.
This field experiment has altered my appreciation for how ecological theory is developed. I appreciate how much effort and time goes into all the studies which help build ecological theory.
