It was a beautiful sunny afternoon with 8 degrees Celsius and 13 km/h wind on 27th April 2022 around 3pm. Apart from the 10 replicates done on 18th April (5 samples from each stratum) I added 30 replicates more today with 15 in each stratum. First, I planned to sample 24 replicates in total with 12 in each stratum but after sampling 24 replicates I felt the need to collect more data in order to strengthen the result and to make it unbiased.
The only trouble I had implementing this study was to select trees of same size (almost) on the randomly selected plot to be fair and unbiased towards the results. Other than that, I feel like I did not find any difficulty to implement stratified sampling method in the Fitness Trail. Throughout the entire trail, I was only able to find one type of lichen species which I have chosen for my study.
I noticed a pattern that was the part of the tree on the North side (the trees on the North side) had an immense growth of lichen whereas on the other hand the area of the tree (the trees on the South side) scarcer lichen growth. In the middle of the trails, I also noticed there was small creek of water passing through where I saw higher proportion of lichen on the tree, another possible factor affecting lichen growth apart from the sunlight.