User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
My data collection went quite well. Soil moisture can be affected by rainfall so I had to make sure I completed my data collection at one time. I collected my data on May 28th at around 1pm PST. It was a cloudy day, but it had rained quite a bit the day prior. I used pre-measured string to establish three transects about 10 m apart from each. One was along the top of the upper-slope, one in the middle, and one along the creek at the bottom. I placed five 16m2 quadrats on each transect, 4 meters apart from each other. This gave me a total of 15 replicates.
The biggest struggle I encountered was that the rain from the previous day had made the slope quite muddy and slippery. This made it especially difficult for me to place my quadrats and transect in the middle of the slope. I slipped a few times and got mud all over me. Another small difficulty was the insertion of the soil moisture meter. At some quadrats, I really had to push hard to get the meter all the way into the soil to the marker.
A pattern I noticed was that the soil moisture was around the same at both the top and bottom of the slope. However, the number of ferns was a lot more abundant at the top than at the bottom. This does not align with my hypothesis and I will have to reflect on some other factors on why this could be while writing my paper. I will take into consideration the greater shade at the top, as well as the bottom of the slope not being drained enough for ferns to grow.
Sounds like you got it done though it is good to wait for soil to drain before sampling if possible to avoid erosion and for safety!