User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Data collection for my project is ongoing. I am observing if the abundance of snow fleas seen on the surface of the snow changes under open or shaded circumstances. My prediction was that snow flea abundance would increase under shade.
I decided to keep on with the same data collection strategy that I used during my initial data collection venture but to ramp it up with multiple observations/counts over several days. Five 0.5m2 treatment quadrats (located under a shaded structure) and five 0.5m2 control quadrats (fully exposed to the sky), randomly spaced in a section of garden, have been visited 3 times a day since March 19 with the goal to continue this systematic temporal observation process until at least March 23. That will make a total of 15 observations, five at 10:00, five at 13:00, and five at 16:00 over the course of five days, to see if a pattern of snow flea preference to open or covered sites is apparent. So spatially there are five treatment and five control replicates, with data measurements occurring 15 times.
So far, the data collection process is going well. I have created a better data collection sheet (Figure 1) and have streamlined the process of collection so that each each count goes relatively fast. Some of the measures I took to facilitate counting should snow flea numbers be too high to quantify in 0.5m2 quadrats have been seemingly unnecessary – though I continue to divide each quadrat into 10cm x 10cm subsamples and quantify snow flea density inside each.
Even though I believe that my hypothesis is worth investigating, I’m finding that my prediction is a bit off base and that snow flea abundance appears to be greater in the open. Other weather-related factors such as cloud cover, precipitation, wind intensity, and changes in snow quality as a result of the artificial shade may be contributing to observed patterns as well as my original prediction which was based on naturally occurring shade within forests. Snow flea abundance has not been as great during this time as I had hoped, and I plan to keep the study site set up even after these 5 days are over so that I can continue to observe snow flea presence and abundance under open and shaded treatments, especially if their surface numbers explode under the right environmental conditions – factors which are still a mystery to me.
