My study started with random sampling by throwing the handmade plastic quadrats to get two quadrats, one as a control and the second as my experimental plot. I needed to throw the quadrats three times to get two quadrats with the same quantity of dandelions. The weather, especially the rain, made the grass and the soil muddy, making mowing quite challenging on the experimental quadrat.
My hypothesis is limiting the predicting variable to the mowing frequency. According to my readings of peer review articles, other factors are essential for the abundance of dandelions, for example, the timings of mowing and the maturity of the dandelions when mowing takes place. My experimental study is too short to determine the cause-and-effect relationship between mowing and dandelion abundance.
- I got our instructor’s feedback on my experimental method, and as a correction, it is not a random sampling; it is haphazard or stratified sampling. Random will be if I have selected a large field and just sampled randomly, without selection plots.