During this field study I had some issues at the beginning with narrowing down the best research project for me and how to conduct this research in the field. One issue I found was conducting ecology research in the middle of winter. This narrowed down what I could focus on. When I decided to do my research on bird species diversity and how that is impacted by anthropogenic disturbances, I had a difficult time figuring out the best way to select sites to conduct the count survey and also figure out the protocol that would work best for this time of year. I think I over complicated the study at the beginning and once I thought into it more, it was easier to select sites based on canopy cover as a categorical value of open or closed and conduct surveys in these chosen areas. I then had to alter my hypothesis to be more simplified and change it to species diversity decreases in closed canopy cover. Once this was narrowed down, the rest of the field research went smoothly and I had an idea of how to layout the data collected.
This course provided me the opportunity to learn more about the research side of ecology. I was able to appreciate that sometimes it seems like data collected out in the field has no significance when you can’t see a trend, but once you look at data more critically and start analyzing it, an explanation can always be found. It also taught me that the ecological theory is important to follow and a lot of emphasis is put on the development of a hypothesis because if this is not strong, your research won’t be either.
Sounds like you learned a lot and had a good experience. More often than not your data turns out differently than expected! And yes, the planning stage is critical!