Throughout the past two weeks I have visited my area of study several times. At each visit I postulated different biological attributes and relationships to investigate. In my first post one of the questions I proposed was: Is a tree’s pinecone production affected by distance from the river? I continued to be interested in this question but quickly realized it would be a difficult question to investigate. A few issues with this research question it is very difficult to tell which trees the pinecones are from, pinecones near the river often float away, and pinecones in other areas are easily disrupted due to wind and human activity. However, these observations led me to wonder if the number of seedlings differ in relation to distance from the Elbow River.
On my March 9th visit I started to investigate and document White Spruce seedlings in my field journal (shown below). I identified White Spruce seedlings using the book Plants of Alberta: Trees, Shrubs, Wildflowers, Ferns, Aquatic Plants & Grasses by France Royer and Richard Dickinson. Due to the vast number of seedlings I decided to limit my focus to seedlings under 2 feet (60.96 cm). The three locations along the gradient I observed were: 0 metres -25 metres from the Elbow River, 26 metres to 50 meters from the Elbow River, and 51 meters to 75 meters from the Elbow River. On this visit I estimated these distance categories, however if I continue to use them in my study, I will use a measuring tape or a smartphone app to provide accurate measurements. While observing the White Spruce seedlings I noticed several patterns. One, the abundance of seedlings seemed to be the greatest in the second location along the gradient (51 meters to 75 meters from the Elbow River). Second, the seedlings in the first location (0 metres to 25 metres) rarely seemed to be greater than 1 foot in height. This seemed especially true within the first 10 meters from the river. Third, in all locations it seemed that most seedlings between 1 foot to 2 feet looked well-nourished (full of green pine needles) but the seedlings under a foot seemed to vary in their nourishment some were full of green pine needles while others looked weak with almost no needles. In order, to see if any of these observations are true studies could be conducted. These studies would determine if the observations I was making are significant or unrelated and within the bounds of normal variability. From my observations I came up with the following hypothesis, prediction, response variable and explanatory variable.
Hypothesis: The distance from the Elbow River influences the abundance of White Spruce seedlings (less than 2 feet in height) within Griffith Woods.
Prediction: The abundance of White Spruce seedlings within Griffith Woods is greatest within 26 metres to 50 metres from the Elbow River.
Response Variable: The number of White Spruce Seedlings within each categorical distance. This variable would be continuous.
Explanatory variable: The categorical distances from the Elbow River (0 meters to 25 meters, 26 meters to 50 meters and 51 meters to 75 metres). Since the various distances are grouped into three categories the variable is categorical.
