Hello,
A difficulty that I had with my sampling strategy was having to redo the number generation for placing my quadrat in the maintained area if the numbers landed on a gravel pathed area, an unmaintained area, within 1 meter of the unmaintained area, or an area dominated by a large tree. The same can be said about when I was placing my quadrats in the unmaintained area, but this was less of a difficulty as I only had to redo the number generation if the quadrat was placed in an area that was dominated by large trees or too close to the edge between the two areas. Also, as the unmaintained areas are not perfect squares or rectangles some quadrats would end up in a maintained area.
I was surprised that after 3 quadrats in the maintained area that I did not find any more species, whereas, in the unmaintained area I kept finding new species including my fifth quadrat which was the last. I am curious to see if this pattern continues for the next data collection when I use more samples.
I plan on using a similar approach, but I think that instead of using the entire park for the maintained area I will use 5 areas that are maintained in the park and then take 2 random samples from each of those. This is what I did for the unmaintained area due to the layout of the park, but I only did one random sample per area for the sample data. I think that this would greatly save time and improve my research as then I can then have plots from 5 different areas of the park and the quadrats are still random within these areas.
I have responded to taylormunro’s post 3 for the second part of this blog post assignment.
Cheers,
Reid Marriott (T0071601)