I think my question and hypothesis was relatively simple. Although it may have been easy, there were a lot of errors and external variables that were hard to account for when doing the research. I will touch on these in my final report. I did end up changing my hypothesis after speaking with Dr. Baldwin, thankfully I had took in/ wrote down other factors during when I would watch for pollinators. I found creating a hypothesis extremely difficult and looking at such things in nature through that scientific eye very difficult. I think this is because I am a chemistry student and am used to being handed an experiment and finishing it within a lab.
Category: Post 9: Field Research Reflections
Blog Post 9: Field Research Reflections
I didn’t have too much trouble implementing my design, however it was maybe too simple. The data ended up being quite difficult to analyse and if I had larger sample sizes, there may have been a more apparent trend. This is the first research project I’ve carried out on my own, so that was much harder than I expected since I had no one to bounce ideas off of as I saw how things played out. The more I learn, the more complicated ecological theory becomes. I am eager to keep working in this field and to continue learning how to design effective and efficient experiments.
Blog Post 9 Reflections
Looking back at the original design of my field research, I recognized a problem getting accurate representation of the mean grass distribution. The grass was naturally distributed in clumps which meant a smaller number of samples would likely result in a misrepresentation of the cover. I made the change to add more transects after the initial collection of data, but I still feel the number of transects could have been doubled to property represent the mean distribution. Prior to taking this course, I took GEOG 3991 Climate Change. I learned about the many negative impacts of climate change on our sensitive ecosystems caused by anthropologic sources. Ecology has deepened my appreciation for how ecologists meticulously gather data which can be used as evidence of the impacts of climate change. I have a greater understanding of the processes that go into research, the time that is in involved in accurately collecting data, as well as the other confounding factors that need to be accounted for.
Post 9
Moving forward, I would review some of the literature prior to designing another experiment. As noted in an earlier post, if I had a deeper understanding of the evolutionary fitness of my response variable I would have chosen different replicates to study. Although the results of my study were much subtler than what I had predicted, I have gained an appreciation for natural history and the importance of ecological theory before engaging in applied or industrial ecology.
Post 9: Field Research Reflections
Designing a field study was an interesting way to identify patterns in nature, and then use theoretical concepts from the textbook to explain my observations. The greatest challenge I faced was designing a study that fit within my time and equipment constraints that could test my hypothesis. From my initial observations, I hypothesized a positive relationship between Canada goldenrod height and level of sunlight exposure. However, I soon realized that height of the goldenrod plant involved too many confounding variables, since I could not determine when the plants began growing. Furthermore, due to my time constraint, I would not be able to measure any significant growth over a period of time. As such, I revised my hypothesis and study design to measure plant density, which I assumed would be affected similarly by sunlight. Designing my study was straight forward, however, implementing it into the field was relatively challenging. The quadrat sampling method was the best method to collect my data, but it was time consuming to accurately pinpoint the randomly generated coordinates within my study area. Additionally, I had to navigate my study area in a way to least disrupt the surrounding vegetation.
Designing and implementing my own field study has given me a greater appreciation for ecological theorists. Collecting reliable data is extremely tedious and an iterative process. Furthermore, when dealing with nature there are many confounding factors that to be considered. I can only imagine the amount of work that must go into designing an irrefutable ecological theory!
Post 9: Field Research Reflections
Since the field experiment that I designed and based my research around was fairly straightforward and simple, I did not have many difficulties in carrying out data collection or analysis. I did not make any changes from my original design that I drafted back in April as the abundance of mature western redcedar trees in the research area did not change between the spring and late summer when my analysis and report were concluded. There are aspects of field work that I had never considered before completing this project, and it definitely allowed me to appreciate the meticulous record keeping that must be done when large experiments and observations are being conducted. The work that is done by ecologists to preserve mature stands of forest is incredibly important and this research has made me acknowledge just how much work and dedication the ecologists have put into the conservation of the natural world and our understanding of it.
Blog Post 9 – Field Research Reflections
I did not have any issues implementing the design, so I did not have to make any changes to the design. After completion I have started to consider that it would have been good to choose a location that doesn’t have as many anthropogenic influences (i.e. a wild field, not municipally owned). I believe that the interactions such as the competition the grass adds because of lawn mowing and disturbances caused by both humans and domesticated animals may have skewed some of the results. These were things that I did not realize initially, but I believe that with time and experience these would be factors that I would have picked up on sooner. I think that this first personally designed ecological study was an eye opener and has given me my first real good glimpse into what working in the field could be like. Engaging in this practice of ecology and designing this field research has greatly increased my appreciation of the entire study of ecology and everyone who partakes in it. I think that I was very unprepared for how much thought goes into these studies and also how much actual physical effort does too. My fieldwork was in no way large scale and I was exhausted and my neck hurt from counting all the clovers. I have a great appreciation for ecologist’s work ethics and perseverance.
While conducting my research and looking for relevant journals and papers I came across this article and found it very interesting. This idea of “clover lawns” is what sparked my interest into researching Trifolium repens.
Blog post 9: Field Research Reflections
The fieldwork this class has allowed me to perform was very engaging and motivating in my biology undergrad journey. I very much enjoyed applicating of all this theory on field research and biological work that I have been studying and fantasizing about. Conducting my own study was a challenge on its own as it was the first time I had ever done a full project of this sort fully by myself. I loved the freedom of choice we had in the beginning as t what we would be studying. This freedom of choice actually made it challenging as with my very limited experience in research, I had a few flaws in my initial plans. Per example, my first ideas were way too grandiose and hopeful. I quickly understood the extent of the work necessary to drive research in the field. What I loved about this, is that it motivated me for future potential larger-scale studies in my career instead of simply discouraging me. I lowered the scale of my research here in order to create quality work but I simply cannot wait to participate in larger, more important work. Another flaw my initial plan had was the lack of a control in my idea of assessing the gradient in flower abundance. I have greatly learned from this experience and as I said cannot wait or te next. I greatly appreciated the systematic way ecological work is done. I believe that to understand such an intricate system that is a community or an ecosystem, empirical work is necessary to formulate a more informed guess as to what is really going on. I think the scientific method is a great way to understand greater scheme problems and ecology showed me a fun way to systematically work on a system as complicated as a field full of seemingly random flowers. I love finding patterns!
Blog Post 9: Field Research Reflections
At the beginning stages of my field research project, I took a day or two to choose my research topic and my first observations of the area went smoothly. Since my sample area was located in my backyard, time was never a factor with my field data collections. However, the further I got into this project, the more difficulties I faced. An important lesson that I learned was that not all potential explanatory variables will be easily collected, examined or measured. I found this when I was deciding on how to represent and measure the effects of pH on Common Fern Moss percent cover. I was unable to easily measure the pH of the dead and healthy portions of grass and I was unable to think of a way to represent this data while displaying the relationship between pH and absence/presence of Common Fern Moss. I had to work around this problem by resorting to research articles touching on this relationship instead. In terms of the design of my project, I had to make a few adjustments along the way which weren’t too problematic. For example, I changed my quadrat size from 1m2to 0.25m2in order to minimize the amount of overlap between quadrats, and by doing this I had to recollect data on the first five quadrats I placed in the yard (which wasn’t an inconvenience as I had to collect data on 10 additional quadrats anyways…). Enrolling in this course and carrying out this research project on my own has not only altered my perspective on this practice, but has also increased my appreciation for the time and effort put in by ecologists to understand ecological processes and patterns. Conducting a research project isn’t easy, and from my experience, I believe it is a task that requires quite a bit of patience and an optimistic and open mindset.
Blog Post 9!
I was really happy with how my field experiment was designed and carried out. I only needed to change minor things along the way. I decided to make the quadrat bigger and only stick to categorical response variables so I could use the ANOVA statistical framework. It did take me awhile to find the right tide pools because there is variation between the distances from the low-tide mark that the certain pools would be at. I have great appreciation for all ecologist out there because it is not easy developing a theory since the data need to be in replicates but those are not always easy to find. I now understand the time and effort that goes into ecological theory.
