During the initial stages of my field research project, I experienced a significant influx of thoughts and ideas that posed a challenge to maintaining focused attention on the specific aspect of herbivory investigation. My primary objective was to evaluate the number of leaf damage in individual plants, with a particular interest in understanding whether variances in ground level influenced herbivores and other natural enemies. Such interactions could potentially impact the distribution patterns of non-native and invasive species. This study primarily focused on analyzing the dependent or response variable which was to measure the herbivory damage. Meanwhile, my predictor variables in this study was the two plant species: Gaultheria shallon (native) and Daphne laureola (invasive) and habitat location (high ground vs. low ground)
Adding to the complexity, the physical demands of climbing up the elevation were intensified by a prior leg workout. Furthermore, I had to be extremely cautious while navigating the terrain, as inadvertently damaging the leaves of the plants I was monitoring could lead to inaccurate results. Despite these challenges, the data I collected revealed an intriguing pattern: there appeared to be less herbivory damage on Daphne, both in high ground and low ground areas, when compared to Salal. This observation may be attributed to Daphne’s ability to outcompete native plants and reduced herbivory due to its chemical defenses.
At this stage, I am using 0.5m by 0.5 m. to count the number of leave damage per individual and this could create some bias that would affect my result. I think it would be better for me to use the sample units as an individual plants within each habitat location, so that my number of replicates would be independent, meaning that the herbivory measurements for one plant should not influence the measurements for another plant. In addition, I still contemplate whether it would be beneficial to incorporate the calculation of leaf damage percentages (are of whole leaf vs affected area) However, in order for me to do I will be removing leaf from the plant and tracing it on the grid (which I am not sure if I’m allowed to do that since I am planning to have atleast 10 replicates each). This additional analysis could provide a more detailed understanding of the extent of herbivory damage and its distribution among different plant species.
Overall, I think you can collect a lot more data by using counts of damaged leaves instead of trying to estimate the amount of leaf area. I think you are better off choosing individual plants of each species and then counting the number of leaves on each plant and the number of damaged leaves. Then you can calculate the proportion of damaged leaves on each plant. Using a quadrat could bias your data in a lot of ways. First, you might have more of one plant than another in the quadrat. Second, each plant may have different number of leaves so a proportion will get around that bias.
I don’t mark that critically for grammar in the blog posts though keep in mind this is a key part of the marking scheme for the written assignments. Your blog post has a quite a few grammatical errors.