User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
May 29, 2021 at 5:55 PM
The area that I selected is a city park that is not so far from my place, called Floden Park Loop Trail ,situated at 4209 111 Avenue NW, Edmonton, Alberta. Its approximate size is around 1.2 km and 23 m elevation. It is a loop trail park with lots of vegetation, river (water body), forested frees, bird, walking trail and small animals. I visited this park at 5:55PM on May 29, 2021 and the weather was nice, sunny and warm and little windy, 18-20 degrees.
The potential subjects I want to study based on my observations are following:
I observed the profusion of small animals such as squirrels, rabbits and birds, for example, a medium sized black bird, (probably black billed magpie), crows, geese and small sparrows (maybe Boreal Chickadee). I noticed all these around the trees and on the ground near water, feeding on grass, earthworms, flowers (dandelions, sunflower, etc.), seeds, fruits, other small insects, mushrooms near river (beside vegetation near water body) and some on the trees, on fallen tree logs and some around the roots of the trees. Some of the birds were fighting and competing for food. They might have nests in those trees or laid eggs there. I was questioning why dandelions are found everywhere on the ground as I have seen them almost everywhere even in the school parks near me. I was also thinking about the diversity and abundance of mushrooms as they were noticed and are there any poisonous mushrooms in the city. I saw bracket fungi, Jelly fungi and coral fungi. I also saw small holes digged in the park, illustrating presence of rabbits and squirrels. There were many dogs too with their owners (some running after birds). I am interested in researching about birds (especially geese, terns, seagulls and black billed magpie), mushrooms and trees. The grass and trees are fully grown. The questions includes:
- What do these birds usually eat for the survival of themselves and their young ones and how many hardships and challenges they have to face during it?
- What migratory birds are seen often here in this area and how are they adapted to the weather, food and other conditions to the place where they migrate and is there any competition or predation that they face within the species or from diverse bird species? How do they cope with it? Does the location makes any impact on their number, biomass and density?
- What kind of tree species are found here the most, any principal species and how are they beneficial to other organisms and is there any mutualism or commensalism found in the ecological community where they are located?
- What factors help in sustaining the abundance and diversity of fungus and mushrooms in the biological area? What are the different types of mushrooms?
- Evaluate on the distribution of density dependence among birds, insects or smaller mammals?
You have a nice sounding study area and lots of potential study species or groups of species to focus on. I find fungi pretty cool, though can be hard to study.
One challenge with your questions is that some of them are broader questions about species evolution which won’t be possible to study here. Some are also just questions about species life history strategies and so again is not really a study.
Also, do you have a gradient in your study of some sort, does the vegetation change throughout or maybe there are areas of different levels of disturbance. Some of your questions are about what is found here? We want you to look at why some sort of pattern exists. Like is bird diversity different in x habitat vs. x habitat and why that might be. I think going through module 2 and 3 and do the tutorials on experimental design will help a lot and you will revisit these questions and narrow them down and think about them in more detail as you work on blog post 3.