As I began more extensive observations in Magee Park, I began to notice three distinct areas in the park. I have labelled them locations 1 through 3 in my field journal and made observations in each location. The organism I will be focusing my project on is the population of mallard ducks that call Magee Park home. Upon observation, the ducks rarely venture out of location 1. This pattern seems to correlate with the fact that location 1 has the highest amount of foot traffic compared to locations 2 and 3. A potential hypothesis that I could investigate is that the duck population in Magee Park is directly linked to human activity in the park. If this hypothesis were true, that would mean that the duck population only exists in this location because of the man made park/path here. In this situation, the response variable would be the ducks, and the explanatory variable would be human activity. Both of these variables are categorical variables.
Hi, I really like your study of duck, it seems so interesting. the hypothesis you made seems appropriate, but this study might have too many possible variables to impact the results more than just human activity. did the location 1 have more food resources than location 2 and 3? Did the humidity and the vegetation coverage similar in these 3 locations?
I cannot open the notes you attched above, so I’ll share some of my ideas in choosing locations. You may would like to choose three similar locations, like all of them besides a lake or forest. It may reduce the non-ideal factors that influence the predictor variables, thus, the observation in the relationship between ducks and human activity could be more precisely.