After a considerable amount of thought towards the pros and cons of submitting a table versus a graph, I decided to go with a table. The benefit of the table is that it was able to more accurately represent what is going on in the deer herbivory study at the native plant garden at my college. It is easy to see which species were most abundant across the entire site and then to see which species were impacted by herbivory and those that were not. I was having issues being able to portray all of this in a single graph. I tried doing a variety of graphs including column, bar, and funnel but could not make it show the scientific and common name of the species as well as accurately portray the species abundance and how much the species was impacted by herbivory. I still would like to have a graphical representation of the data but the table is strongest at this time.
I was impressed though because the data revealed quite clearly that there are certain herbaceous species that deer absolutely love and others that they absolutely avoid. I have been reading up in the literature about selection by deer and different things that impact what they eat.
