Post 9: Reflections

The field experiment makes me wish this course had a part two, both because it was enjoyable and I learned so much about what I might do differently. I found the whole thing quite intimidating at first and wound up changing my hypothesis after I collected my first set of data. It was interesting to read the articles for the project and to find myself wishing I’d thought of that or heard of that earlier.
My first batch of data had a lot of detail, I would record what plant was in each of nine squares on my transect. For the second one I recorded whether they were there or not. If I was doing my study again I would either count how many transects had a plant, or practice estimating how much of it they covered. This would be easy to record and enter into my spreadsheet and make my conclusions stronger. I shied away from doing that initially since I worried I’d be way off base, but I think that would have been a better approach. I would have also gone for more fine-grained data in other ways, such as canopy coverage.
I have a much greater respect for how ecological research is done. It reminds me of how I viewed playing a musical instrument before I learned compared to after. There’s people out there who are much more skilled than I am, but I can sort of see how they got there and better appreciate what they’re doing. As the course went on the research articles I read became much more interesting and I began looking back at previous ones for ideas, or just because something finally “clicked”.
I’ve also found myself planning a bit of followup to the research I’ve done. My project touched on invasive ivy and I noticed a lot of new growth popping up as the weather warmed up. I found myself wondering if it’ll survive a dry summer or not. I noticed that in some of the papers I read for this course authors will reference previous work, likely because the paper I’m reading is the followup they just had to do after they finished some earlier study. It makes me appreciate how ecological theory is developed iteratively, with scientists always looking back and forward. I also found myself much more concerned with invasive species in the forest I was studying and the effect they were having on plants I’d mostly ignored (and not known the names of) before.